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Edited  by  the  Rev.  Dom  Bede  Camm,  O.S.B. 


BLESSED    EDMUND 
CAMPION 


*'Go  seek  thy  peace  in  war: 
Who  falls  for  love  of  God,  shall  rise  a  star  I  " 

Ben  Jonson 


mhii  Obstat. 

D.  Beda  CamxM 

Censor  Deputatui 


Jmprtmatur : 

^  GULIELMUS  Episcopus  Artndelensts 

Vicarius  Generaiis 


Westmonasterii, 

die  l^  Januarii^    1908. 


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k.A. 


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V  t.  ii^i^mn:  (u  v^uffii   /Mary.      />.    ,), 


BLESSED   EDMUND 
CAMPION 


BY 

LOUISE   IMOGEN   GUINEY 


BENZIGEi^    feROTHiiRS 

Printers  to  the  Holy  Apostolic  See 

New  York,  Cincinnati,  Chicago 

1908 


Canipiani  Fratribus 

e  Provincia  Anglue  Societatis  Jesu  Tribus 

opusculum  suum 

grato  affectu 

Scriptor 


r 


V 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

This  little  book  leans  much,  as  every  modern 
work  on  the  subject  must  do,  upon  Mr.  Richard 
Simpson's  monograph:  Edmund  Campion^  Jesuit 
Protomartyr  of  England.  In  many  points  supple- 
menting or  contradicting  that  splendid  though 
biased  narrative,  the  present  writer  has  grate- 
fully taken  advantage  of  the  researches  of  the 
Rev.  John  Hungerford  Pollen,  S.J.  It  may 
also  be  useful  to  state  that  the  contemporary 
citations,  when  not  otherwise  specified,  are 
from  two  invaluable  witnesses,  Parsons  and 
Allen.  The  translated  passages  have  been 
compared  with  the  originals,  and  sometimes 
newly  rendered. 

L.  I.  G. 

St.  Ives,   Cornwall:  Epiphany,  1908. 


CONTENTS 

CHAP.  PAGE 

I,    Youth  :  London,  Oxford  :  1540-1566      .  i 

II.     The  Hour  of  Unrest  :  Oxford,  Dublin  : 

1566-1570 14 

III.  Steps  Forward  :  Ireland  :  1571      .        .  27 

IV.  Cheyney  Again  :  Douay  :  1571          .        .  40 
V.    The  Call  to  Come  up  Higher  :  Douay, 

Prague:  1571-1573          •        •        •         •  53 
VI.     The  Wished-for  Dawn  :  Bohemia  :  1573- 

1579 64 

VII.    A  Long  March  :  Rome,  Geneva,  Rheims  : 

1580 75 

VIII.     Inhospitable  Home  :  1580       ...  88 

IX.     Skirmishing  :    the    English    Counties  : 

1580 100 

X.     Many  Labours  :  and  a  Book  :  1580         .  112 

XI.    At  Lyford  Grange,  AND  After  :  158 1     .  129 

XII.     The  Thick  of  the  Fray  :   1581         .        .  141 

XIII.    Victory  :   December  i,  1581    .        .        .166 


LIST   OF   ILLUSTRATIONS 

Campion  reading  an  Address  of  Wel- 
come TO  Queen  Mary        .        .        .        Frontispiece 

Campion  in  his  Proctor's  Robes. 
Gateway  of  St.  John's  College, 
Oxford,  in  Background  .        .        .      tojacep.    i6 

*  P[ater]  Edmundus  Campi ANUS,  Martyr  '        ,,         80 
'We    have    not    broken     through 

HERE  !  ' ,,128 

Campion  before  Queen  Elizabeth    .  ,,144 

*  Not  Guilty  ! ' ,,160 


BLESSED 
EDMUND  CAMPION 

I 

YOUTH:    LONDON,    OXFORD:     154O-1566 

THE  Campion  family  seem  to  have 
been  both  gentlefolk  and  yeomen, 
and  to  have  been  widely  scattered 
over  the  land  :  in  Northamptonshire,  War- 
wickshire, Essex,  Sussex,  and  Devon. 
Nothing  is  definitely  known,  at  present,  as 
to  which  branch  of  the  Campion  family  the 
Blessed  Edmund  belonged.  Unlike  many 
of  the  martyrs  of  Tudor  and  Stuart  times, 
he  was  what  is  called  a  ''  born  "  Catholic  : 
in  more  accurate  phrase,  a  born  heathen, 
as  we  all  are  !  but  baptized  in  his  parents' 
religion  soon  after  his  birth  in  London, 
on  the  Feast  of  St.  Paul  the  Apostle, 
January  25,  in  the  year  1540,  New 
Style.     Edmund  had  two  brothers,  and  a 

B 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

sister,  none  of  whom  played  any  great  part 
in  his  after  life.  By  the  time  he  entered 
the  Society  of  Jesus  his  father  and  mother 
were  both  dead  :  his  written  expression  is 
that  he  had  "  hopes  "  they  died  in  full  com- 
munion with  the  Church ;  but  evidently  he 
did  not  know,  being  abroad,  how  it  had 
fared  with  them  in  those  terribly  stormy 
days  for  Christian  souls. 

Edmund  Campion,  senior,  was  a  book- 
seller, evidently  in  good  standing,  but  not 
well  to  do.  Some  rich  London  guildsmen 
(probably  of  the  Grocers'  Company,  for  it 
was  they  who  maintained  him  later),  be- 
friended the  promising  little  boy  at  just  the 
right  moment,  when  his  father  was  reluct- 
antly going  to  apprentice  him  to  a  trade; 
and  he  was  sent,  at  their  joint  expense, 
to  a  good  Grammar  School.  Afterwards, 
under  the  same  patrons,  he  entered  Christ 
Hospital,  then  lately  set  up  in  Newgate 
Street  (out  of  confiscated  Franciscan  funds 
and  the  generosity  of  Londoners),  as  the 
*'  foundation  "  of  the  sixteen-year-old  king, 
Edward  VL  Here  the  small  Edmund,  full 
of   life  and   laughter,    banded   and   belted, 

2 


YOUTH 

ran  about  in  now  extinct  yellow  petticoats, 
and  one  of  the  earliest  pairs  of  those  his- 
toric yellow  stockings.  He  was  thirteen, 
and  quite  famous  already  in  the  school-boy 
world  of  London  for  his  learning  and  his 
attractive  presence  and  speech,  when  Queen 
Mary  Tudor,  who  had  just  succeeded  to 
the  English  throne,  entered  her  city  in 
state.  Out  of  many  hundred  eligible  young- 
sters it  was  he  who  was  chosen  to  stand 
up  before  her  on  a  street  platform,  under 
the  shadow  of  the  old  St.  Paul's  Cathedral, 
and  shrilly  welcome  her  in  the  Latin 
tongue.  The  Queen  sat  on  a  white  horse, 
robed  in  gold-embroidered  dark  velvet, 
crimson  or  purplish,  with  the  great  sword 
carried  before  her  by  the  boyish  Earl  of 
Surrey,  with  eight  thousand  mounted  lords 
and  gentlemen  on  either  side,  all  the  glitter- 
ing ambassadors,  and  a  bevy  of  beautifully 
apparelled  ladies.  On  certain  figures  in 
that  splendid  and  noisy  pageant  the  child 
might  have  looked  with  pensive  eyes,  had 
he  been  able  to  forecast  his  own  future ;  as 
it  was,  he  cannot  have  failed  to  observe  the 
Queen's  younger  sister,  the  thin,  watchful, 
3 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

spirited  girl  who  was  known  as  the  Lady 
Elizabeth.  Another  was  there,  of  high 
office,  though  not  of  high  descent,  who 
was  all  goodness,  piety  and  generosity, 
and  may  well  have  been  drawn  to  notice 
Edmund  Campion  for  the  first  time  on 
that  sunshiny  afternoon  in  August,  1553- 
This  was  Sir  Thomas  White,  then  Lord 
Mayor  of  London,  a  staunch  Catholic.  He 
was  an  unlearned  man  and  childless,  who 
became,  later,  co-founder  of  the  Merchant 
Taylors'  School,  and  enricher  of  many 
towns.  By  1555  he  had  opened  his  College 
of  St.  John  Baptist,  once  a  Cistercian 
house,  at  Oxford.  The  Grocers'  Company 
at  once  approached  him  to  admit  their  Blue- 
coat  ward  as  a  scholar ;  this  he  did,  and  con- 
ceived, almost  as  soon,  a  marked  attachment 
to  him ;  and  two  years  later  (when  Edmund 
was  not  yet  eighteen  !)  he  made  him  a  Senior 
Fellow.  Campion's  other  early  friends  at 
the  University  were  his  first  tutor,  John 
Bavand,  and  Gregory  Martin,  a  Founda- 
tion Scholar  like  himself.  These  two 
showed  towards  him  a  lifelong  devotion. 
Mary's  troubled  reign  had  covered  the 
4 


YOUTH 

five  most  susceptible  years  of  his  youth, 
and  restored  to  the  country,  despite  its  legal 
excesses,  a  definitely  Catholic  tone.  Things 
were  soon  to  change.  War  by  statute 
against  the  Mass  was  first  declared  in  1559. 
Edmund  Campion  had  left  Oxford  by  the 
time  that  St.  John's,  deprived  of  President 
after  President  by  the  Royal  Commission- 
ers, was  swept  clean  of  all  the  dons  who 
favoured,  or  in  any  degree  tolerated,  the 
jurisdiction  of  that  Apostolic  See  which 
safeguarded  the  doctrine  and  honour  of  the 
Blessed  Eucharist.  But  while  he  lived  in 
his  University  world,  he  lived  untouched. 
He  was  not  looked  upon  as  a  Catholic. 
Nor  was  he  such,  if  his  heart  could  be  fully 
judged  by  his  outward  actions.  Buried  in 
literature,  philosophy,  and  pleasant  tutorial 
work,  he  had  become,  in  his  cultured  in- 
difference, what  St.  Jerome's  accusing 
vision  called  a  **  Ciceronian,"  and  not  a 
Christian  :  a  skin-deep  Ciceronian,  how- 
ever. There  is  only  a  bare  possibility  that, 
on  proceeding  M.A.  in  1564,  he  escaped 
taking  the  wretched  Oath  of  Supremacy, 
and  thereby  acknowledging  the  Queen  as 
5 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

Head  in  spirituals  as  well  as  temporals  with- 
in her  realm  of  England.  He  stretched  his 
conscience,  as  many  were  doing,  thinking 
to  help  along  the  unity  of  faith,  thereby 
defeating  that  unity  for  good  and  all.  An 
almost  unprecedented  vogue  at  Oxford  had 
served  to  blind  him  :  he  was  so  happy,  so 
busy,  so  needed,  so  much  at  home  there. 
Friends  encouraged  him ;  undergraduates 
flocked  about  him,  and  imitated  his  very 
gait  and  tone  as  they  never  have  imitated 
any  one  else  except  Newman. 

Campion  was  a  famous  Latin  scholar ; 
and  he  was  a  good  Grecian  and  a  good 
Hebraist :  Greek  and  Hebrew  w^ere  studies 
newly  revived  just  before  he  was  born. 
He  spoke  as  well  as  he  wrote.  The  flam- 
boyant art  of  oratory,  now  almost  extinct 
in  our  more  quiet-coloured  century,  was 
then  much  studied  and  admired;  and  Cam- 
pion was  famous  for  debates  and  addresses 
and  encomiums.  When  only  twenty,  he  had 
been  called  upon  to  preach,  though  a  lay- 
man, at  the  re-burial  of  poor  Amy  Robsart, 
Lord  Dudley's  young  wife,  in  the  Uni- 
versity church  of  St.  Mary-the-Virgin  ; 
6 


YOUTH 

and  this  he  did  with  great  grace  and  anima- 
tion, and  with  no  small  display  of  tact,  for 
rumours  of  a  murder  with  a  motive  had 
already  got  abroad.  Such  prominence  may 
have  come  to  Campion  through  Sir  Thomas 
White's  request :  Sir  Thomas  had  his 
associations  with  Cum  nor.  Four  years 
later,  Edmund  Campion  was  able  to  put 
sincere  love  and  sincere  grief  into  a  funeral 
oration  (this  time  a  Latin,  not  an  English 
one)  for  the  good  and  dear  Founder  him- 
self, w'hose  body  was  solemnly  interred  in 
the  Chapel  of  his  College. 

In  September,  1566,  Queen  Elizabeth 
made  the  first  and  happier  of  her  two  visits 
to  Oxford.  In  the  Queen's  train  was  Dud- 
ley; also  a  quieter,  plainer,  less  noticed 
man,  but  one  out  of  all  comparison  with 
him  for  astute  power  :  this  was  Sir  William 
Cecil,  the  Prime  Minister,  afterwards 
known  far  and  wide  as  Lord  Burghley. 
There  were  farces  and  tragedies  for  the 
Queen  at  Oxford,  there  were  musical  per- 
formances, theological  disputations,  and 
other  academic  sports.  In  front  of  the 
vast  assemblage  stood  forth  Master  Cam- 
7 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

pion  of  St.  John's,  alone  in  his  ruff,  hood 
and  gown.  As  representative  of  the  Uni- 
versity, he  welcomed  smiling  royalty,  and 
Dudley,  now  Earl  of  Leicester,  Chancellor 
of  the  University,  and  royalty's  magnificent 
favourite.  Campion  shone,  as  well,  in  the 
absurd  discussions  in  natural  science  which 
followed.  The  Queen  and  Dudley  marked 
him,  as  they  could  not  fail  to  do;  for  no- 
thing could  exceed  the  courtliness  with  which 
he  had  performed  his  task.  The  Chan- 
cellor sent  for  him  in  private,  and  expressed 
the  Queen's  good-will,  w^hereby  Campion 
might  bid,  through  him,  for  whatever  pre- 
ferment he  chose.  But  Campion,  always 
truly  modest  and  full  of  ironic  humour  as 
well,  would  ask  of  his  patron  nothing,  he 
said,  but  his  continued  regard.  The  young 
bookman  had  a  real  liking  for  the  vicious 
worldling,  liked  by  several  sensitively  good 
men,  then  and  since.  Sir  William  Cecil 
also  took  instinctive  interest  in  Campion 
and  his  eager  dialectics.  Altogether,  there 
was  no  more  popular  man  in  Oxford  or 
elsewhere.  Campion  was  on  the  hilltop  of 
professional  and  personal  success. 
8 


YOUTH 

In  all  this  beautiful  fountain-play  of  "  the 
things  which  are  seen,"  he  was  running 
the  very  gravest  risk  of  spiritual  ruin. 
Perhaps  he  could  not  know,  in  his  leaf- 
hung  hermitage,  what  a  tremendous 
muster  of  souls  was  going  on,  now  that  the 
ancient  Church  and  a  new  statecraft  were 
to  fight  it  out  in  England.  Queen  Eliza- 
beth's quarrel  with  the  Pope  was  hardly 
more  doctrinal  than  her  royal  father's  had 
been  :  she,  too,  would  have  been  quite  con- 
tent to  live  all  her  days  as  a  Catholic,  pro- 
vided that  Catholicism  would  prove  her 
slave.  The  battle  was  not  between  two 
known  religions.  On  one  side  was  con- 
servative England  with  a  belief;  on  the 
other  the  strong  spirit  of  secularism,  plus 
a  few  fanatics  formed  not  by  the  English, 
but  the  Continental  Reformation.  Religion 
in  itself  troubled  the  Court  party  as  little 
as  anything  could  possibly  do.  It  was  be- 
cause the  spirit  of  Catholicism  seemed  to 
them  to  threaten  their  particular  kind  of 
national  pride,  and  to  interfere  with  their 
particular  kind  of  worldly  prosperity,  that 
Cromwell  in  one  great  Tudor  reign,  Burgh- 
9 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

ley  in  the  other,  tried  to  put  it  down.  They 
wished  to  get  good  citizenship  acknow- 
ledged not  as  an  ideal,  but  as  the  supreme 
ideal,  and  they  cared  not  how  much  else 
was  shovelled  out  of  the  way.  Their  only 
use  for  religion  was  to  bring  it  well  under 
the  authority  of  the  law  and  the  supremacy 
of  the  Crown.  They  had  no  objection  to 
high  respectability,  but  a  most  violent  ob- 
jection to  the  supernatural  life,  because  that 
gives  to  those  who  practise  it  a  dangerous 
independence.  Elizabeth  wanted  unity  and 
peace.  Her  subjects  were  to  be  forced  by 
statute  to  pray  less  and  to  pray  all  alike; 
and  to  be  thereby  trained,  somehow,  to  put 
Sacraments  and  Saints  and  the  Papacy  out 
of  their  heads.  English  humankind  were 
to  forsake  their  happy  wild  life,  as  it  were, 
in  the  Church  Universal,  and  all  become,  as 
if  by  magic,  one  large  tame  pet  lying  in  a 
ribboned  collar  on  the  royal  hearth.  This 
is  a  vision  which  has  appealed  to  many 
another  head  of  a  commonwealth  as  desir- 
able, though  unaccountably  difficult !  Some 
worthy  persons  have  brought  themselves  to 
believe  that  nothing  to  speak  of  happened 

lO 


YOUTH 

at  the  Reformation.  But  at  the  time, 
everybody  understood  in  the  clearest 
fashion  that  an  old  moral  system  which 
would  not  come  to  terms  had  been  dropped, 
and  a  more  satisfactory  one  created.  It  was 
a  working  theory  of  that  age,  all  over 
Europe,  that  a  governor  had  the  right 
to  fix  the  belief  of  subjects.  What  was 
wanted  in  England  was  made  to  order,  out 
of  the  rags  of  ruined  doctrine  and  discip- 
line. Foreign  Protestants  raged  over  its 
externals,  as  having  too  much  of  the  old 
thing,  but  the  bullying  State,  riding  rough- 
shod over  Convocation  and  the  laity,  was 
perfectly  at  ease,  know^ing  that  there  was 
more  than  enough  of  the  new  thing  to 
colour  the  whole,  and  to  colour  it  once  and 
for  ever.  There  was  no  affection  for  "  con- 
tinuity "  in  those  days  except  among  the 
*'  Romans."  The  attitude  of  their  perse- 
cutors was  that  of  men  in  a  fury  that  any 
Englishman  should  dare  to  connect  himself 
either  with  the  world  at  large,  or  with  his 
country's  own  disclaimed  yesterday.  The 
State  Trials,  for  instance,  bear  this  out  in 
a  score  of  places.  Many  an  official  answer 
II 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

resembles  the  one  made  to  that  interesting 
character  Blessed  Ralph  Sherwin,  when  he 
said  truly  that  his  coming  back  to  his  own 
land  was  to  persuade  the  people  to  Catholic 
Unity.  "  You  well  know/'  so  the  Counsel 
reproved  him  in  Westminster  Hall,  "that 
it  was  not  lawful  for  you  to  persuade  the 
Queen's  subjects  to  any  other  religion  than 
by  her  Highness's  instructions  is  already 
professed."  The  "received  religion,"  or, 
as  it  was  quite  as  often  called,  the  "  Queen's 
religion,"  was  simply  the  new  idea  of 
nationalism  torn  away  from  relationship  to 
the  arch-idea  of  nations,  which  is  the  law  of 
God.  It  was,  in  practice,  no  adoring  angel 
at  the  Altar,  but  a  capable  parish  beadle  at 
the  door.  Now  this  was  never  the  Catholic 
conception  of  what  religion  has  been,  or  is 
meant  to  be.  Happily,  many  thoroughly 
patriotic  Englishmen  felt  that  no  least  jot  of 
Christian  revelation,  however  much  it  stood 
in  the  way  of  Caesar,  could,  with  their  con- 
sent, be  put  by;  and  to  keep  it  free  they 
were  willing  to  make  themselves  very  dis- 
agreeable indeed  to  their  revered  sovereign, 
and  to  their  more  easy-going  countrymen. 

12 


YOUTH 

With  that  rude  definiteness  which  is  ever 
their  chief  family  trait,  the  better  Catholics 
threw  their  full  force  against  the  Oaths  of 
Supremacy  and  Acts  of  Uniformity,  as  soon 
as  they  understood  their  meaning.  The 
centuries  passed  since  then  prove  that  they 
succeeded  in  holding  asunder  what  the 
Queen  would  join  together.  Was  it  un- 
reasonable that  she  punished  the  men  who 
tried  to  spoil  her  dream?  And  almost  the 
chief  of  these  men  Edmund  Campion  was 
destined  to  be,  though  years  were  to  pass 
before  he  lent  his  whole  heart  to  the  work 
God  willed  him  to  do. 


II 

THE  HOUR  OF  UNREST  :    OXFORD,    DUBLIN  : 

I 566- I 5 70 

THOUSANDS  who  were  comfortably 
placed  in  life,  and  conscientious, 
too,  had  a  great  deal  to  suffer  until 
things  were  made  plain.  Edmund  Cam- 
pion began  to  fret,  and  argue,  and  ponder, 
and  pray  for  light  in  secret,  for  several  years 
going  about  "that  most  ingeniose  Place" 
(as  a  later  lover  called  Oxford)  with  heavy 
thoughts.  Oxford  itself,  despite  the  Ecclesi- 
astical Commission  fixed  there  to  worry  it, 
was  more  Catholic  in  spirit  than  any  other 
city  in  England.  Nevertheless  Campion's 
temptation  to  conform  was  very  great.  We 
must  remember  that  many  of  his  first  im- 
pressions and  memories  were  Anglican.  He 
was  brought  up  during  his  early  school 
life  on  the  new  Liturgy,  which  came  into 
14 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

operation  before  his  tenth  year.  He  knew 
now,  in  manhood,  that  to  change  about,  and 
forsake  the  State  reHgion  for  the  only 
Church  which  is  as  exacting  as  her  Master, 
would  be  to  see  the  ruin  of  his  happy  career. 
His  strong  point,  in  the  beginning,  was  not 
what  is  called  brute  courage.  His  was  the 
nervous,  Hamlet-like  temper,  natural  to 
students  and  recluses,  which,  by  a  fatal 
error,  puts  endless  thinking  into  what  needs 
only  to  be  done. 

During  these  years  Campion  read  a  great 
deal  of  theology,  as  in  his  position  he  was 
bound  to  do,  according  to  University  rules. 
Where  everything  else  except  his  inmost 
heart  inclined  him  to  heresy,  the  Fathers 
drove  him  back  upon  the  fulness  of  revealed 
truth.  The  day  which  he  spent  with  St. 
Augustine,  or  St.  Jerome,  or  St.  John 
Chrysostom,  was  a  day  on  which  (to  catch 
up  the  phrase  of  his  friend  and  biographer, 
Fr.  Robert  Parsons,  himself  a  Balliol  man) 
he  was  ready  "  to  pull  out  this  thorn  of  con- 
science." But  on  the  morrow  returned  the 
old  spirit  of  obstinacy  and  delay.  Mean« 
while  the  Anglican  influence  was  gaining 
15 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

for  Campion's  dearest  friend  of  many, 
Richard  Cheyney,  the  Lord  Bishop  of 
Gloucester,  was  drawing  him  on  towards  his 
own  ideals,  which  were  "  Catholic-minded," 
if  not  Catholic.  The  learned,  gentle  and 
lovable  Cheyney  withstood  with  zest  the 
risen  Puritan  party,  and  in  his  hold  on 
sound  doctrine  stood  apart  from  all  his  col- 
leagues on  the  Episcopal  Bench.  He  had 
been  brought  up  as  a  Catholic,  and  ordained 
according  to  the  full  Catholic  ritual,  in 
1534.  The  reminder  is  sometimes  needed 
that  Protestants  did  not  shoot  up  full-grown, 
that  all  original  Protestantism  was  made  up 
of  human  material  once  Catholic.  From 
first  to  last,  however,  Cheyney  could  not 
be  forced  to  coerce  the  Church  which  he  had 
abandoned.  In  this  he  stood  not,  as  has 
been  stated,  quite  alone  among  the  Eliza- 
bethan Bishops,  for  Downham  of  Chester 
and  Ghest  of  Rochester  shared  his  honour- 
able abstinence,  though  in  less  degree.  The 
moment  Cheyney  was  out  of  the  w^ay,  the 
Catholics  on  his  diocesan  ground,  hitherto 
safe,  were  mercilessly  harried.  He  had 
been  made  a  Bishop  against  his  will,  dis- 
16 


Bid.    Edmund   Campion    in   Proctor  s   robes. 
(Gateway  of  St.  John's  College.  Oxford,  in  background) 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

plac  ing  the  true  occupant  of  the  See,  when 
Ills  friend  Edmund  Campion  was  two-and- 
twenty.  In  most  matters  Cheyney  followed 
Luther;  Cranmer's  more  heretical  doctrines, 
which  prevailed  on  all  sides  in  England,  he 
thoroughly  hated.  He  longed  always  for  a 
reconciliation  which  was  never  to  be,  and 
never  can  be.  He  longed  to  see  the  Catholics 
(against  the  well-thought-out  and  oft-re- 
peated prohibition  of  their  leaders,  between 
1562  and  1606)  do  a  little  evil  to  procure  a 
great  good:  namely,  smooth  matters  over, 
escape  their  terribly  severe  penalties,  and  in 
the  end  become  able  to  leaven  the  lump  of 
English  error,  by  the  mere  preliminary  of 
attendance  at  the  service  of  Common  Prayer 
according  to  law,  in  their  ow^n  old  parish 
churches.  The  Book  of  Common  Prayer, 
as  he  would  remind  them,  was  expressly 
designed  to  suit  persons  of  various  and  even 
contradictory  religious  views :  Catholic ; 
not-so-very  Catholic;  ex-Catholic;  non- 
Catholic;  anti-Catholic!  Campion  often 
rode  over  the  hills  to  Gloucester  to  sit  by 
the  episcopal  hearth-fire,  book  on  knee,  and 
hear  such  theories  as  this,  and  sympathize 
17  C 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

with  the  lonely  old  man  who  "  saw  visions," 
and  had  little  else  in  his  vexed  life  to  con- 
tent him.  His  strong  double  desire  was 
to  save  by  his  own  effort  for  the  Church 
of  England  separated  from  Rome,  that 
great  body  of  ancient  belief  and  practice 
sure  otherwise  to  be  lost  in  the  flood  of 
invited  Calvinism;  and  to  secure  Edmund 
Campion  himself  as  his  intellectual  coad- 
jutor and  successor,  as  one  of  high  gifts 
likely  to  '*  drink  in  his  thoughts  and  become 
his  heir."  The  two  were  together,  not  only 
in  matters  of  dogma,  but  in  all  minor  points. 
Cheyney  shared  with  Campion  dislike  of 
politics,  telling  the  Council  that  in  such 
matters  he  was  *'  a  man  of  small  experience 
and  little  observation."  He  kept  his  old 
priestly  ideals,  and  would  never  marry. 
Campion,  too,  chose  to  be  a  celibate.  If  he 
gave  his  heart  to  either  Church,  he  saw  even 
then  that  it  must  be  an  undivided  heart.  To 
him,  with  his  underlying  tenderness  towards 
the  ancient  faith,  and  his  dream  of  peace- 
making through  compromise,  which  is  so 
English,  and  just  in  these  matters  so  mis- 
taken, the  mission  thus  opened  out  appealed. 
i8 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

Half  reluctantly,  yet  not  realizing  the  dis- 
loyalty of  his  act  (as  he  himself  tells  us), 
he  allowed  himself  to  receive  from  Chey- 
ney's  hands  Deacon's  orders  in  the  Church 
of  England. 

His  interior  struggle,  from  this  day  forth, 
went  from  bad  to  worse.  With  the  un- 
affected simplicity  of  his  character,  he  talked 
over  his  difficulties  not  only  with  Cheyney, 
but  with  any  one  at  Oxford  who  seemed 
able  to  help  him.  As  a  consequence,  the 
Grocers*  Company,  whose  exhibition  he  still 
held,  heard  rumours,  grew  uneasy,  and 
began  to  suspect  him,  ending  in  1568  by 
inviting  Campion  up  to  London  to  save  his 
credit  by  preaching  at  Paul's  Cross,  and 
publicly  "  favouring,"  as  they  expressed  it, 
"  the  religion  now  authorized."  He  begged 
for  time,  and  that  being  granted,  for  more 
time.  He  attended  a  court  of  the  Company  in 
order  to  plead  engagements,  and  to  say  that 
he  was  not  his  own  man,  while  deep  in 
academic  duties  and  at  the  service  of  under- 
graduates :  ''divers  worshipful  men's 
children,"  he  calls  them.  He  was  Public 
Orator  and  Proctor,  in  fact,  by  now,  as  well 
19 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

as  Fellow  and  Tutor  of  his  College.  (He 
never  resided  long  enough  to  take  his 
Doctor's  degree.)  He  exacted  from  the 
Company  a  written  statement  of  the  dogmas 
he  was  expected  to  avow;  and  finding  it 
impossible  to  subscribe  to  the  hot  hetero- 
doxy thus  laid  down,  he  cut  his  first  tether 
by  resigning  his  exhibition. 

His  most  brilliant  colleague  at  St.  John's, 
Gregory  Martin,  who  had  protested  in  vain 
against  Campion's  diaconate  (which  was  to 
cause  the  recipient  extreme  remorse  for  a 
long  time),  had  become  a  convert  to  Catho- 
licism, and  sacrificed  all  his  secular  pro- 
spects. He  wrote  to  his  dear  friend  to  warn 
him  against  ambition,  and  to  urge  on  him 
escape  from  moral  bondage.  ''  Come  !"  the 
fervent  letter  cried;  *'  if  we  two  can  but  live 
together,  w^e  can  live  on  nothing.  If  this 
be  too  little,  I  have  money;  and  if  this  also 
fails,  one  thing  is  left :  '  they  that  sow  in 
tears  shall  reap  in  joy!'"  Such  earnest 
words,  though  seeming  wasted,  had  their 
share  in  shaking  Edmund  Campion's  rest. 

With  the  summer  term  of  1570  his  Proc- 
torate  expired.  He  spent  the  Long  Vacation 
20 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

in  tutoring  the  eiglit-years-old  Harry  Vaux, 
eldest  son  of  Lord  Vaux  of  Harrowden,  who 
afterwards  beautifully  redeemed  his  childish 
promise.  The  end  of  Michaelmas  term 
found  Campion  face  to  face  for  the  last  time 
with  that  life  which  he  had  so  loved,  and  in 
which,  with  his  scientific  enthusiasm  for 
letters,  he  had  been  such  a  wonderful  in- 
spiration to  young  men.  There  was  no  con- 
scious motive  in  his  heart  deeper  than  a 
thirst  for  such  freedom  as  had  become  diffi- 
cult in  a  Puritanizing  University,  when  he 
cut  himself  loose,  slipped  out  of  it  for  good, 
and  took  ship  for  Ireland. 

In  the  new  move  he  had  the  approbation 
of  Leicester,  and  the  companionship  of  a 
much-attached  Oxford  disciple,  Richard 
Stanihurst,  who  is  remembered  by  posterity 
only  for  his  grotesque  translation  of  Virgil. 
Campion  may  well  have  left  home  with  the 
understanding  that  he  should  have  a  clear 
educational  field  in  Dublin,  but  he  arrived 
a  little  too  late.  The  outlook  had  been  very 
bright.  Some  good  men  then  in  power  were 
eager  for  the  revival  of  the  extinct  Univer- 
sity of  Dublin,  an  ancient  Papal  foundation, 

21 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

but  ruined,  as  all  the  great  Schools  were 
(most  of  them  permanently,  some  only  tem- 
porarily), by  the  religious  changes.  The 
chief  supporters  of  the  plan  were  enthusi- 
astic, far-sighted,  and  most  liberally  inclined 
towards  Catholics.  Fear  and  prejudice 
therefore  stepped  in,  in  the  person  of  Eliza- 
beth's Irish  Bishops.  The  Lord  Chancellor, 
Dr.  Weston,  wrote  privately  to  the  Queen, 
deploring  the  popularity  of  the  scheme,  and 
begging  her  to  take  the  unborn  foundation 
**  into  her  merciful,  motherly  care."  She 
followed  that  advice.  In  token  thereof,  in 
due  season  arose  Trinity  College,  Dublin, 
as  a  complete  checkmate  to  the  earlier  pro- 
ject, quite  safe  for  evermore  from  Papist 
blight.  Thus  was  Campion  cheated  of  a  con- 
tinuance of  his  natural  vocation,  in  serving 
upon  the  staff  of  the  new  University.  Two 
of  his  friends  who  had  most  concern  in  it 
were  James  Stanihurst,  father  of  Richard, 
and  Sir  Henry  Sidney,  then  Lord  Deputy  of 
Ireland,  who  had  proffered  it  lands  and 
money.  Leicester  would  have  provided 
Campion  with  a  letter  of  introduction  to  Sir 
Henry,  his  own  brother-in-law.   The  latter's 

22 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

young  son,  Philip,  was  at  this  time  a  student 
in  Oxford,  where  his  governor,  Thomas 
Thornton  of  Christ  Church,  afterwards  Vice- 
Chancellor,  had  been  constantly  in  Cam- 
pion's society.  Sir  Henry  Sidney  always 
bore  himself  most  kindly  towards  Campion. 
The  latter  lived,  a  more  than  welcome  guest, 
under  the  roof  of  James  Stanihurst,  then 
Recorder  of  Dublin,  and  Speaker  of  the 
local  House  of  Commons.  Stanihurst  was 
the  head  of  an  Anglo-Irish  family  not  openly 
Catholic  since  Queen  Mary's  reign.  Indeed, 
in  his  public  capacity,  he  had  often  sided 
against  Catholicism,  although  he  was  as 
friendly  as  Sidney  himself  to  those  who  pro- 
fessed it.  In  the  midst  of  this  temporizing 
household.  Campion,  himself  a  temporizer, 
came  during  the  winter  to  be  doubted  by  cer- 
tain bigots  outside.  Very  possibly  he  was  too 
free-spoken.  Campion  **  came  to  Ireland 
believing  in  practically  all  Catholic  dogmas, 
even  in  the  Eucharist,  and  in  the  authority  of 
the  Council  of  Trent."  The  impression  may 
have  got  abroad  that  his  then  unknown 
variety  of  Anglicanism  differed  little  from 
the  dangerous  creed  of  times  past,  lately 
23 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

discovered  to  be  the  proper  business  of 
the  police  !  Whatever  the  reason,  Campion 
began  to  be  a  marked  man.  Sir  Henry 
Sidney  told  Stanihurst  with  heat,  that  so 
long  as  he  was  Governor  he  would  see  to 
it  that  "  no  busy  knave  of  them  all  should 
trouble  him,"  on  Campion's  account.  Under 
this  unpleasant  circumstance  of  espial,  added 
to  the  disappointment  he  had  just  under- 
gone, the  sensitive  exile  presently  fell  ill, 
and  got  a  most  affectionate  nursing  from  the 
Stanihursts,  till  his  strength  revived.  He 
started  as  soon  to  write  a  treatise  on  a 
subject  of  which  his  mind,  up  to  now,  had 
been  full :  the  character  and  aim  of  the  ideal 
youth  at  the  Universities.  This  De  Juvene 
Academico  reminds  us  of  a  theme  by  another 
great  Oxonian  who  was  in  Dublin  three 
hundred  years  later,  and  had  also  to  face  the 
heartbreaking  failure  of  an  Irish  University 
dreamed  of,  and  not  to  be.  Campion  after- 
wards recast  his  fine  little  work,  and  under 
its  second  form  it  is  to  be  found  among  the 
few  Opuscula  published  after  his  death. 
His  comely  face  and  gracious  manner  were 
quickly  taken  into  favour  in  his  Dublin 
24 


THE    HOUR    OF    UNREST 

circle.  While  he  was  gaining  a  contrary 
repute  on  hearsay,  the  few  who  had 
access  to  him  nicknamed  him  ''  the 
Angel." 

Meanwhile,  hating  idleness,  and  bent  on 
redeeming  what  may  have  looked  like  a 
foolish  absence  from  Oxford,  Campion 
planned  the  composition  of  a  brief  History 
of  Ireland.  Friends  helped  him  in  "in- 
quiring out  antiquities  of  the  land."  He 
was  what  we  should  call  a  thorough  "re- 
searcher," a  bird  by  no  means  common  in 
those  early  days.  He  went  here  and  there 
among  musty  manuscript  records  of  the 
city,  and  from  library  to  library  in  the 
country,  happily  gathering  in  his  materials 
for  work.  He  had  been  some  three  months 
in  Ireland  when  on  a  March  midnight  there 
came  a  sudden  warning  from  the  faithful 
Lord  Deputy,  who  was  on  the  point  of  leav- 
ing for  England.  Campion  learned  thereby 
that  Weston  the  Chancellor  had  pursuivants 
ready  to  arrest  him  the  next  morning  !  The 
Stanihursts  acted  at  once,  and  hurried  their 
friend  into  the  care  of  Sir  Christopher 
Barnewall  and  Dame  Marion  Sherry,  his 
25 


EDMUND'   CAMPION 

wife,  of  Turvey  House,  in  the  parish  of 
Donabate,  eight  miles  away.  There,  breath- 
less with  the  sudden  flight  through  the 
dark,  the  three  devoted  escorts  left  him  in 
safety. 


26 


Ill 

STEPS   FORWARD:    IRELAND:     1 57 1 

THE  Barnewalls  were  in  feeling  both 
more  Catholic  and  more  Irish  than 
the  Stanihursts,  and  they  showed 
Edmund  Campion  a  no  less  tender  hospit- 
ality. The  great  house  was  in  a  beautiful 
and  remote  situation.  Running  in  and  out 
of  it  was  a  horde  of  laughing  children,  in- 
cluding the  eleven-year-old  Janet  who  was 
to  become  Richard  Stanihurst's  early-dying 
wife.  Campion  loved  the  hearty  Knight, 
their  father,  and  their  lady  mother,  whom 
he  calls  "  in  very  sooth,  a  most  gentle 
and  godly  woman."  Though  he  mingled 
freely  with  the  life  of  the  family,  he  was 
considerately  given  the  great  garret  to  write 
in  and  hide  in.  Here  he  began  his  little 
History.  First  of  all,  though,  he  sent  back 
a  grateful  missive  in  Latin  to  the  men  who 
had  been  so  providently  kind  to  him.  To 
27 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

the  Recorder,  he  says  :  "  Was  I  not  fortun- 
ate in  such  friendship  and  patronage  as 
yours  ?  How  good,  how  generous  it  was  of 
you  to  take  in  an  unknown  stranger,  and 
to  keep  him  all  these  months  on  the  fat  of 
the  land  !  You  looked  after  my  health  as 
carefully  as  after  Richard's,  the  son  worthy 
of  your  love.  You  supplied  me,  too,  with 
books,  and  made  the  best  possible  provision 
for  my  time  of  study  :  may  I  perish,  if  ever 
in  this  world,  outside  my  room  in  Oxford, 
I  had  sweeter  dealings  with  the  Muses ! 
.  .  .  Up  to  this,  I  have  had  to  thank  you 
for  conveniences;  but  now  I  must  thank 
you  for  my  rescue,  and  my  very  breath, — 
yes,  breath  is  just  the  word  !  for  they  who 
succumb  to  these  persecutors  are  wont  to  be 
thrust  into  dismal  dungeons,  where  they 
inhale  filthy  fogs,  and  are  cut  off  from 
wholesome  air.  But  now,  through  you  and 
your  children's  kindness,  I  shall  live,  please 
God  .  .  .  most  happily."  The  stress  laid, 
in  this  affectionate  letter,  upon  the  writer's 
appreciation  of  personal  care,  of  the  privacy 
dear  to  students,  of  good  diet  and  pure  air, 
tells  its  own  tale  of  physical  delicacy. 
28 


STEPS    FORWARD 

Campion  was  slight  in  build,  and  like  many 
another  tireless  and  quenchless  spirit  known 
to  history,  at  no  time  really  strong.  He 
ends  by  asking  that  his  St.  Bernard  may  be 
sent  on  to  him,  and  encloses  a  lively  page 
for  his  friend  Richard,  recalling  the  service 
rendered  in  snatching  him  from  danger,  and 
conveying  him  to  Turvey  House.  "Is  it 
not  hard,"  Campion  breaks  out,  "  that  be- 
holden to  you  as  I  am,  I  have  no  w^ay 
of  showing  it?  .  .  .  Meanwhile,  if  these 
buried  relics  have  any  flavour  of  the  old 
Campion,  their  flavour  is  for  you  .  .  .  you 
and  your  brother  Walter  .  .  .  you,  up  that 
whole  night  through,  and  he,  summoned 
to  us  from  his  w^ife's  side.  Seriously,  I 
ow-e  you  much.  I  have  nothing  to  write 
about  unless  you  have  time  and  inclina- 
tion for  a  laugh.  Have  you?  Then  hold 
your  breath,  and  listen  !  The  day  after  I 
came  here,  as  I  sat  down  to  work,  into  the 
bedroom  burst  a  poor  old  soul,  coming  on 
what  business  I  wot  not.  She  knew  no- 
thing of  me,  so  seeing  me  suddenly  at  her 
left,  took  me  for  a  ghost !  Her  hair  rose 
on  end;  she  went  dead  w^hite;  she  stared 
29 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

aghast;  her  jaw  fell.  'What  is  the 
matter?'  quoth  I,  whereupon  she  almost 
collapsed  with  fright.  Not  a  syllable  could 
she  utter,  but  made  shift  to  flounce  out  of 
the  room,  and  pour  into  her  mistress's  ear 
how  some  sort  of  hideous  spectre  had  ap- 
peared to  her  on  the  top  floor !  This  was 
repeated  to  me  at  supper.  They  called  the 
little  old  thing  in,  and  made  her  relate 
her  scare.  We  all  nearly  died  with 
laughter;  and  I  was  established  as  quite 
alive." 

The  book,  put  together,  as  was  almost 
all  Campion's  literary  work,  under  highly 
disturbing  conditions,  is  unfinished;  and 
what  there  is  of  it  is  sketchy  and  out  of 
proportion.  One  of  its  charms  is  its 
character-drawing,  including  the  speeches 
with  which,  after  the  fashion  of  Livy, 
Campion  fits  the  situation  by  putting  them 
into  the  mouths  of  his  personages.  His 
was  a  dramatic  mind.  He  knew  both 
history  and  human  nature  :  the  latter  know- 
ledge crops  up  everywhere  in  all  that  he 
wrote,  and  spoke,  and  did,  and  supplied 
him  with  no  small  share  of  his  power  over 
30 


STEPS    FORWARD 

others.  The  outstanding  charm  of  the 
History  of  Ireland  is  its  style,  crisp,  arrest- 
ing, bright  with  idiom  :  an  idiom  so  noble 
and  so  much  his  own,  that  one  understands 
the  almost  breathless  admiration  with  which 
his  generation  looked  up  to  him  and 
listened  to  him.  But  this  book,  like  the 
l^iew  of  the  Present  State,  written  some 
seventeen  years  later  by  another  gentle- 
hearted  Englishman,  the  poet  Spenser,  is 
all  wrong  in  its  theory  that  to  get  any  foot- 
ing in  the  modern  world  the  '*  mere 
Irishry "  must  be  Anglicized.  Campion 
did  not  know  the  Celts,  their  laws,  nor 
their  literature;  he  never  came  nearer  to 
them  than  through  chronicles  written  in 
scorn  of  them,  or  the  daily  table-talk,  wide 
of  the  mark,  of  the  English  Pale.  Yet, 
according  to  his  opportunity,  he  loved  the 
country  and  the  people,  and  deplored  that 
the  descendants  of  a  race  of  mediaeval 
scholars  should  be  cut  off  from  education. 
Afterwards  he  felt  that  his  rather  helter- 
skelter  pamphlet  represented  limited  know- 
ledge and  unformed  opinion;  he  speaks  of 
it  as  "premature,"  and  wished,  when  he 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

lost  the  manuscript,  that  it  might  perish 
rather  than  reach  the  public  as  it  was.  It 
bore  a  dedication  to  the  Earl  of  Leicester, 
his  "  singular  good  lord,"  in  the  hope  that 
it  might  "  make  his  travel  seem  neither 
causeless  nor  fruitless,"  or,  as  he  says 
again  in  plainer  language  :  "I  render  you 
my  poor  book  as  an  account  of  my  voyage." 
It  was  first  printed,  without  supervision 
from  the  author,  in  a  very  muddled,  unsatis- 
factory way,  by  Raphael  Holinshed  in 
1577;  then  in  more  scholarly  fashion  by 
Sir  James  Ware,  in  his  Ancient  Irish  His- 
tories^ 1633.  We  all  remember  how^  useful 
Holinshed's  pages  were  to  Shakespeare : 
the  twenty  lines  or  so  of  the  famous  de- 
scription of  Wolsey  in  Act  IV,  Scene  2,  of 
Henry  VHI,  is  taken  almost  word  for 
word  from  what  Campion  had  written, 
and  Holinshed  had  incorporated  in  his 
Chronicles, 

Nowhere  in  this  little  book,  begun  and 
broken  off  at  Turvey  House,  and  purposely 
non-committal  in  its  religious  expressions, 
is  there  any  sign  that  its  author  had 
already,    as   some   have   thought,    returned 


STEPS    FORWARD 

to  the  Church.  For  Parsons,  his  earliest 
biographer,  whose  facts  concerning  these 
years  were  suppHed  by  Richard  Stanihurst, 
says  of  Campion  that  his  purity  and  devout- 
ness  in  Ireland  were  marked,  although  he 
was  not  in  the  Church.  Fr.  Pollen,  sum- 
ming up  the  evidence  of  these  written 
pages,  considers  Campion  "  near  to  the 
Church,  but  distinctly  avoiding  a  confes- 
sion of  faith." 

Chancellor  Weston,  a  zealot  of  the  most 
pronounced  Protestant  type,  made  a  livelier 
pursuit  after  having  been  baffled  by  Cam- 
pion's escape  from  Dublin.  The  latter  found 
himself  quite  unable  to  lead  any  sort  of 
orderly  life,  thanks  to  the  restless  hue  and 
cry  after  him ;  and  one  day  he  recognized 
with  a  shock  of  horror  the  penalties  to 
which  he  was  exposing  the  generous 
friends,  so  far  unmolested,  who  were  giving 
him  shelter.  His  conscience  would  not 
allow  him  to  come  out  with  a  flat  denial  of 
Catholic  tenets  or  sympathies.  His  only 
alternative,  after  a  half-year  in  Ireland,  was 
flight  homeward.  Here  once  more  he  was 
aided  (though  they  were  in  great  sorrow  at 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

his  decision)  by  his  Anglo-Irish  friends, 
those  *'dear  friends  which  ever  after  he 
loved  most  entirely,  and  they  him." 

Richard  Stanihurst,  as  private  tutor  to 
the  children  of  the  Earl  of  Kildare,  had 
acquaintance  with  the  Earl's  steward,  Mel- 
chior  Hussey.  This  man  (a  character  by 
no  means  admirable)  was  about  to  embark 
at  Drogheda  for  a  visit  to  England,  and  it 
was  arranged  that  Campion  should  be  dis- 
guised to  pass  as  his  Irish  servant.  Thus, 
in  the  month  of  May,  putting  himself  under 
the  special  patronage  of  the  national  Saint, 
and  adopting  his  name,  Campion  boarded 
the  ship  as  '*  Mr.  Patrick."  Officers  of 
the  law  promptly  appeared  on  the  track  of 
the  quasi-Papist,  delaying  the  weighing  of 
the  anchor,  annoying  the  crew,  upsetting 
the  cargo,  and  questioning  every  passenger 
on  deck  except  the  harmless-looking  person 
who  stood  "  in  a  lackey's  weed  "  behind 
Hussey.  Edmund  Campion  was  a  born 
actor.  He  put  on  and  kept  up  a  highly 
stupid  expression,  while  he  was  praying 
with  might  and  main  for  St.  Patrick's  inter- 
cession in  his  great  danger !  He  had  cause 
34 


STEPS    FORWARD 

to  thank  his  new  patron  in  Heaven,  al- 
though the  party  of  searchers  swooped 
upon  his  bags  below  deck,  and  carried  off 
with  them  the  rough  draft  of  his  precious 
manuscript,  that  History  of  Ireland  which 
he  was  to  see  no  more  for  many  a  year. 

The  early  summer  of  1571  was  ill-starred. 
Various  startling  events  had  conjoined  like 
tidal  waves  to  lift  the  misbehaving  English 
Government  up  to  its  highest  pitch  of 
alarm.  Chief  of  these  was  the  Bull  of  De- 
position against  Queen  Elizabeth,  issued 
by  the  Holy  See  after  consultation  with 
many  temperate  English  advisers.  John 
Felton,  a  gentleman  of  Southwark,  posted 
a  copy  of  it  upon  the  palace  gates  of  the 
Bishop  of  London,  on  the  morning  of  May 
25,  the  Feast  of  Corpus  Christi :  by  August 
he  was  to  pay  for  the  bold  act  with  his  life. 
The  Queen  of  Scots  had  newly  arrived  in 
England.  London,  by  the  time  Campion 
reached  it,  was  in  a  ferment.  "  Nothing 
was  to  be  found  there  but  fears,  suspicions, 
arrestings,  condemnations,  tortures,  execu- 
tions. .  .  .  The  Queen  and  Council  were 
so  troubled  that  they  could  not  tell  whom 
35 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to  trust,  and  so  fell  to  rigorous  proceedings 
against  all,  but  especially  against  Catholics, 
whom  they  most  feared;  so  that  Campion 
could  not  tell  where  to  rest  in  England,  all 
men  being  in  fear  and  jealousy  one  of 
another.'* 

Campion  had  not  broken  his  old  bonds, 
yet  nothing  interested  him  so  powerfully 
as  the  things  of  religion.  The  love  of  God 
was  lying  in  wait  for  him,  and  forced  his 
hand.  Of  all  possible  places  in  London 
where  he  might  have  gone  on  the  26th  or 
27th  of  May,  he  chose  Westminster  Hall, 
in  order  to  attend  the  trial  of  Dr.  John 
Storey,  former  Principal  of  Broadgates 
Hall  (Pembroke  College)  in  Oxford,  and 
that  University's  first  Regius  Professor  of 
Civil  Law.  Dr.  Storey  was  very  feeble  for 
his  years,  which  were  sixty-seven.  By  a 
wretched  breach  of  international  law  he 
had  been  trapped  at  Antwerp,  carried  away 
from  his  wife  and  family  to  England,  and 
arraigned  for  having  "  feloniously  and 
traitorously  comforted  Richard  Norton," 
his  own  friend,  the  old  hero  of  the  Pilgrim- 
age of   Grace.     But  the   real  cause  of  his 

36 


STEPS    FORWARD 

arrest  and  execution  was  a  much  larger 
matter.  He  was  a  troublesomely  consistent 
person.  He  had  spoken  out  in  the  House 
of  Commons  against  the  new  Liturgy  in  the 
first  Parliament  of  Edward  VI,  and  against 
the  Supremacy  Bill  in  the  first  Parliament 
of  Queen  Elizabeth.  He  had  been  an 
Ecclesiastical  Commissioner  under  Queen 
Mary.  Foxe,  in  the  famous  Book  of 
MartyrSy  lies  in  the  most  reckless  way 
about  Storey's  part  in  those  sordid  bygone 
persecutions,  and  Holinshed  and  Strype 
and  many  another  historian  repeat  Foxe. 

Storey  was  an  honourable  and  even 
merciful  man,  but  a  man  of  his  time. 
People  were  much  of  a  piece  in  the  six- 
teenth century  when  it  came  to  holding  to 
the  grindstone  the  nose  of  the  unwilling ! 
There  is  this  to  be  said,  however :  that  the 
Marian  courts  dealt  out  death  to  heretics 
and  malcontents,  and  candidly  stopped 
there,  and  were  not  inspired  to  any  cruelty 
more  subtle;  whereas  Good  Queen  Bess  not 
only  dealt  out  death  very  much  more  liberally, 
but  invented  a  poison  for  all  the  springs 
of  life.  Her  statutes,  terribly  oppressive 
37 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

from  the  first,  ended  in  what  Burke  calls  the 
most  hateful  code  framed  since  the  world 
began :  Penal  Laws  which,  especially 
from  1585  on,  struck  without  mercy  at 
Catholics  in  their  rights  of  worship,  pro- 
perty, inheritance,  education,  travel,  pro- 
fessions, public  service  and  private  liberties 
of  every  kind.  Another  point  to  be  noted 
in  passing  is  that  Queen  Mary  persecuted 
her  subjects  for  changing  their  religion. 
Her  more  ingenious  sister  persecuted  them 
for  not  changing  it !  Historians  have  not 
dwelt  much  upon  the  difiference,  but  to  a 
reader  with  some  philosophy  in  him  it  will 
have  no  little  weight. 

Dr.  Storey  was  executed  five  days  after 
his  trial,  under  even  more  horrible  circum- 
stances than  were  usual.  Edmund  Cam- 
pion had  then  left  England,  after  an  ex- 
ceedingly short  stay.  His  standing  watch 
in  Westminster  Hall  had  done  more  for 
him  than  many  arguments  and  exhorta- 
tions :  it  kindled  a  spark  in  him  which 
made  him,  in  Lord  Falkland's  phrase, 
"  ready  for  the  utmost  hazard  of  war.** 
There  was  a  cause  to  which  he  could  run 

38 


STEPS    FORWARD 

home;  there  was  a  vocation  to  which  he 
could  climb  :  these  opened  out  before  him 
as  he  stood  in  the  surging  indoor  crowd. 
**  He  was  animated  by  that  blessed  man's 
example,"  says  Parsons,  **  to  any  danger 
and  peril  for  the  same  faith  for  which  the 
Doctor  died."  Edmund  Campion  lost  no 
time.  There  had  been  enough  of  that  sad 
old  game,  and  he  was  thirty-one  years  old, 
with  three  quarters  of  his  too  brief  life  be- 
hind him.  Now  he  w^as  awake,  and  had 
touched,  in  the  dark,  his  heart's  long- 
patient  Master.  He  set  out  at  once  for  the 
nearest  stronghold  of  apostolic  souls,  the 
English  Seminary  at  Douay  in  Belgium. 


39 


IV 

CHEYNEY   AGAIN  :    DOUAY  :     1 57 1 

INTERRUPTED  sea-voyages  were  his 
fate.  This  time,  half-way  across  the 
Channel,  his  ship  was  hailed  by  a 
Government  frigate,  The  Hare,  which 
demanded  to  be  shown  the  ship's  sailing 
papers,  and  the  passports  of  her  passengers. 
Campion  had  none.  Moreover,  as  his 
religion  was  suspected,  the  dutiful  Pro- 
testant frigate,  homeward  bound,  promptly 
swallowed  him,  bag  and  baggage.  His 
generous  friends  in  Ireland  had  forced 
upon  him  money  for  his  needs,  and  the 
captain  who  now  kidnapped  him  found  it 
convenient  to  keep  the  money,  but  kind- 
heartedly  let  his  prisoner  lose  himself  in  the 
streets  of  Dover.  Other  friends  quickly 
made  the  losses  good.  On  Campion's 
second  attempt  to  reach  Calais  all  went 
well.  He  did  not  lack  his  secular  epitaph, 
40 


CHEYNEY    AGAIN 

so  to  speak,  at  Court.  It  was  not  then  a 
legal  crime,  though  it  soon  became  so,  for  a 
Catholic  Englishman  to  leave  the  country 
fast  being  made  into  a  hell  for  him.  The 
mighty  Cecil  treated  this  expatriation  as 
quite  voluntary.  '*  And  it  is  a  very  great 
pity,"  he  chose  to  say,  looking  into  Richard 
Stanihurst's  gratified  eyes,  *' for  Master 
Campion  was  one  of  the  diamonds  of 
England." 

The  date  of  Campion's  reconciliation  to 
the  Church  is  unknown.  It  seems  unlikely 
to  have  taken  place  in  Ireland.  He  may 
have  been  absolved  from  his  schism  in 
London,  or  else  as  soon  as  he  had  reached 
Douay.  There  was  a  busy  trade  in  wool  still 
flourishing  at  that  time  between  Flanders 
and  England,  and  in  the  thrifty,  kindly 
towns  of  the  exporting  country  refugees 
formed  a  considerable  part  of  the  popula- 
tion. Douay,  properly  speaking,  Douai, 
was  called  "  Doway  "  by  its  foster-children. 
The  creation  of  its  English  Seminary  was  a 
master-stroke  of  Dr.  William  Allen,  Canon 
of  York,  afterwards  Cardinal,  once  of  Oriel 
College,  Oxford,  and  Principal  of  St. 
41 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

Mary  Hall.  Indeed,  **  Oxford  may  be 
said  to  have  founded  Douay.'*  Allen  was 
aided  by  many  men  of  mark,  notably  by  his 
old  tutor,  Morgan  Phillipps,  and  by  the 
latter's  bequeathed  funds;  also  by  the 
Flemish  Abbots  and  layfolk.  Campion 
seems  to  have  been  the  eighteenth  arrival 
in  the  newly  established  house  of  young, 
prayerful,  enthusiastic  men.  He  found 
there  as  Professor  of  Hebrew,  his  beloved 
Gregory  Martin,  and  a  learned  colleague, 
Richard  Bristow,  late  Fellow  of  Exeter 
College,  the  first  of  the  Seminarian  priests 
to  be  ordained  :  two  props  and  pillars  of  the 
foundation.  There  also  was  Thomas  Staple- 
ton,  late  Fellow  of  New  College,  the  most 
able  Catholic  controversialist  of  the  age. 
Five  of  the  twenty  English  students  enrolled 
in  1 57 1,  joined  the  Society  of  Jesus.  The 
College,  destined  to  speedy  and  splendid 
development,  was  affiliated  to  the  Douay 
University,  established  some  eight  years 
before  it  by  Spanish  munificence  and  a 
Papal  Bull.  Here,  then,  Edmund  Campion 
came  into  his  soul's  haven,  "out  of  the 
swing  of  the  sea." 

42 


CHEYNEY    AGAIN 

It  was  Dr.  Allen's  missionary  policy  that 
all  his  sons,  before  memory  of  them  had 
grown  dim  at  home,  should  write  to  their 
more  undecided  friends  in  England,  doing 
what  they  could  to  win  them  to  the  service 
of  Christ  in  the  Church  Catholic.  Campion 
sent  a  very  long  document  to  this  end  to  his 
venerated  and  now  ageing  friend,  Bishop 
Cheyney  :  a  wonderful  letter,  in  that  live 
Elizabethan  English,  which  was  bold  as 
surgery  itself,  yet  charged  with  feeling. 
Associating  his  beliefs  with  Cheyney's  as 
the  writer  does,  he  helps  us  to  understand 
his  own  doctrinal  position  while  in  Oxford 
and  in  Dublin.  He  failed  in  both  places, 
writes  Fr.  Morris,  for  the  same  reason  : 
*'  the  position  was  a  false  one,  for  it  was  an 
effort  to  serve  two  masters,  and  to  live  like 
a  Catholic  and  teach  the  Catholic  religion 
outside  the  pale  of  the  Catholic  Church." 
*'  There  is  no  end  or  measure,"  he  now  tells 
Cheyney  from  Douay,  "  to  my  thinking  of 
you  ;  and  I  never  think  of  you  without  being 
horribly  ashamed.  ...  So  often  was  I  with 
you  at  Gloucester,  so  often  in  your  private 
chamber,  with  no  one  near  us,  when  I  could 
43 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

have  done  this  business,  and  I  did  it  not!'* 
By  ''this  business"  he  means  confessing 
Catholic  truth,  and  urging  Cheyney  to  re- 
turn to  it.  "And  what  is  worse,  I  have 
added  flames  to  the  fever  by  assenting  and 
assisting.  And  although  you  were  superior 
to  me,  in  your  counterfeited  dignity,  in 
wealth,  age  and  learning,  and  though  I  was 
not  bound  to  look  after  the  physicking  or 
dieting  of  your  soul,  yet,  since  you  were  of 
so  easy  and  sweet  a  temper  as  in  spite  of 
your  grey  hairs  to  admit  me,  young  as  I 
was,  to  familiar  intercourse  with  you,  to  say 
whatever  I  chose,  in  all  security  and  secrecy, 
while  you  imparted  to  me  your  sorrows  and 
all  the  calumnies  of  the  other  heretics 
against  you ;  and  since  like  a  father  you  ex- 
horted me  to  walk  straight  and  upright  in 
the  royal  road,  to  follow  the  steps  of  the 
Church,  the  Councils,  and  the  Fathers,  and 
to  believe  that  where  there  was  a  concensus 
of  these  there  could  be  no  spot  of  falsehood ; 
I  am  very  angry  with  myself  that  I  neg- 
lected to  use  such  a  beautiful  opportunity 
of  recommending  the  Faith :  that  through 
false  modesty  or  culpable  negligence,  I  did 
44 


CHEYNEY    AGAIi\ 

not  address  with  boldness  one  who  was  so 
near  to  the  Kingdom  of  God.  But  as  I  have 
no  longer  the  occasion  that  I  had  of  persuad- 
ing you  face  to  face,  it  remains  that  I  should 
send  my  words  to  you  to  witness  my  regard, 
my  care,  my  anxiety  for  you,  known  to  Him 
to  whom  I  make  my  daily  prayer  for  your 
salvation.  Listen,  I  beseech  you,  listen  to  a 
few  words.  You  are  sixty  years  old,  more 
or  less  "  (Cheyney  was  really  sixty-eight), 
"of  uncertain  health,  of  weakened  body; 
the  hatred  of  heretics,  the  pity  of  Catholics, 
the  talk  of  the  people,  the  sorrow  of  your 
friends,  the  joke  of  your  enemies.  Who  do 
you  think  yourself  to  be?  What  do  you 
expect  ?  What  is  your  life  ?  Wherein  lies 
your  hope  ?  In  the  heretics  hating  you  so 
implacably  and  abusing  you  so  roundly? 
Because  of  all  heresiarchs  you  are  the  least 
crazy  ?  Because  you  confess  the  Living 
Presence  of  Christ  on  the  Altar,  and  the 
freedom  of  man's  will  ?  Because  you  perse- 
cute no  Catholics  in  your  diocese  ?  Because 
you  are  hospitable  to  your  townspeople, 
and  to  good  men  ?  Because  you  plunder 
not  your  palace  and  lands,  as  your  brethren 
45 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

do  ?  Surely  these  things  will  avail  much,  if 
you  return  to  the  bosom  of  the  Church,  if 
you  suffer  even  the  smallest  persecution  in 
common  with  those  of  the  Household  of 
Faith,  or  join  your  prayers  with  theirs.  But 
now,  whilst  you  are  a  stranger  and  an 
enemy,  whilst,  like  a  base  deserter,  you 
fight  under  an  alien  flag,  it  is  in  vain  to 
attempt  to  cover  your  crimes  with  the  cloak 
of  virtues.  .  .  .  What  is  the  use  of  fighting 
for  many  articles  of  the  Faith,  and  to  perish 
for  doubting  of  a  few  ?  .  .  .  He  believes  no 
one  article  of  the  Faith  who  refuses  to  be- 
lieve any  single  one.  In  vain  do  you  defend 
the  religion  of  Catholics,  if  you  hug  only 
that  which  you  like,  and  cut  off  all  that 
seems  not  right  in  your  eyes.  There  is  but 
one  plain,  known  road  :  not  enclosed  by  your 
palings  or  mine,  not  by  private  judgment, 
but  by  the  severe  laws  of  humility  and 
obedience :  when  you  wander  from  these 
you  are  lost.  You  must  be  altogether 
within  the  house  of  God,  within  the  walls 
of  salvation,  to  be  sound  and  safe  from  all 
injury;  if  you  wander  and  walk  abroad  ever 
so  little,  if  you  carelessly  thrust  hand  or  foot 

46 


CHEYNEY    AGAIN 

out  of  the  ship,  if  you  stir  up  ever  so  small 
a  mutiny  in  the  crew,  you  shall  be  thrust 
forth  :  the  door  is  shut,  the  ocean  roars  : 
you  are  undone  !  .  .  .  Do  you  remember  the 
sober  and  solemn  answer  which  you  gave 
me  when  three  years  ago  we  met  in  the 
house  of  Thomas  Button  at  Shireburn, 
where  we  were  to  dine  ?  We  were  talking  of 
St.  Cyprian.  I  objected  to  you  (in  order  to 
discover  your  real  opinions)  that  Synod  of 
Carthage  which  erred  about  the  baptism  of 
infants.  You  answered  truly  that  the 
Holy  Spirit  was  not  promised  to  one  Pro- 
vince, but  to  the  Church;  that  the  Universal 
Church  is  represented  in  a  full  Council ;  and 
that  no  doctrine  can  be  pointed  out  about 
which  such  a  Council  ever  erred.  Acknow- 
ledge your  own  weapons,  which  you  used 
against  the  adversaries  of  the  Mystery  of 
the  Eucharist !  .  .  .  Here  you  have  the  most 
.  .  .  apostolic  men  collected  at  Trent  ...  to 
contend  for  the  ancient  faith  of  the  Fathers  ! 
All  these,  whilst  you  live  as  you  are  living, 
anathematize  you,  hiss  you  out,  excommuni- 
cate you,  abjure  you."  Campion  goes  on  to 
urge  upon  Cheyney  an  outward  adherence 
47 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to   the   Council  which  had   discussed  and 
resolved  his  own  private  beliefs.     *'  Espe- 
cially now  you  have  declared  war  against 
your  colleagues,  why  do  you  not  make  full 
submission,  without  any  exceptions,  to  the 
discipline  of  these  Fathers  ?  .  .  .  Once  more, 
consult  your  own  heart,  my  poor  old  friend  ! 
give  me  back  your  old  beauty,  and  those 
excellent   gifts   which    have   been    hitherto 
smothered  in  the  mud  of  dishonesty.    Give 
yourself  to  your  Mother  who  begot  you  to 
Christ,    nourished    you,    consecrated    you; 
acknowledge  how  cruel  and  undutiful  you 
have  been  :   let  confession  be  the  salve  of 
your  sin.   ...  Be  merciful  to  your  soul  ; 
spare  my  grief.   Your  ship  is  wrecked,  your 
merchandise   lost :    nevertheless,    seize   the 
plank  of  penance,  and  come  even  naked  into 
the  port  of  the  Church.    Fear  not  but  that 
Christ  will  preserve  you  with   His  hand, 
run  to  meet  you,  kiss  you,  and  put  on  you 
the  white  garment :  Saints  and  Angels  will 
sing  for  joy  !     Take  no  thought  for  your 
life  :  He  will  take  thought  for  you  who  gives 
the  beasts  their  food,  and  feeds  the  young 
ravens  that  call  upon  Him.   If  you  but  made 

48 


CHEYNEY    AGAIN 

trial  of  our  banishment,  if  you  but  cleared 
your  conscience,  and  came  to  beliold  and 
consider  the  living  examples  of  piety  which 
are  shown  here  by  Bishops,  priests,  friars, 
Masters  of  Colleges,  rulers  of  Provinces,  lay 
people  of  every  age,  rank  and  sex,   I  be- 
lieve that  you  would  give  up  six  hundred 
Englands  for  the  opportunity  of  redeeming 
the  residue  of  your  time  by  tears  and  sor- 
row. .  .  .  Pardon    me,    my    venerated    old 
friend,  for  these  just  reproaches,  and  for  the 
heat  of  my  love.     Suffer  me  to  hate  that 
deadly  disease;  let  me  ward  off  the  immi- 
nent danger  of  so  noble  a  man  and  so  dear 
a  friend  with  any  dose,  however  bitter.  And 
now  if  Christ  give  grace  and  you  do  not 
refuse,  my  hopes  of  you  are  equal  to  my 
love  :   and  I  love  you  as  passing  excellent 
in   nature,    in   learning,    in   gentleness,    in 
goodness,  and  as  doubly  dear  to  me  for  your 
many    kindnesses   and   courtesies.     If   you 
recover  your  [spiritual]  health,  you  make  me 
happy  for  ever.    If  you  slight  me,  this  letter 
is  my  witness.    God  judge  between  you  and 
me  :  your  blood  be  on  yourself  !     Farewell, 
from  him  that  most  desires  your  salvation." 
49  E 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

One  phrase  in  this  steel  web  of  phrases 
from  the  pen  of  a  rhetorician  with  a  heart, 
shows  that  Campion  knew  of  Cheyney's  sad 
and  now  compHcated  position  in  England. 
The  letter  was  written  November  i,  1571. 
A  Convocation  had  met  in  the  preceding 
April,  on  the  heels  of  the  Act  of  Uniformity, 
to  which  Cheyney  was  summoned  in  vain. 
It  required  the  signing  of  the  Thirty-nine 
Articles,  and  enacted,  under  Archbishop 
Grindal's  leadership,  many  things  equally 
hateful  to  Cheyney,  such  as  displacement 
and  defacement  of  Altar-stones — (a  great 
symbol,  this,  and  no  mere  act  of  pillage  !), 
the  abolition  of  Prayers  for  the  Dead,  the 
prohibition  even  of  the  Sign  of  the  Cross  in 
church.  Cheyney,  excommunicated  for  his 
wilful  absence,  afterwards  sued  by  proxy 
for  absolution,  for  the  sake  of  averting 
temporal  penalties :  but  he  had  nothing 
more  to  do  with  the  hierarchy.  '*  Now  you 
have  declared  war  against  your  colleagues," 
shows  that  Campion  had  heard  accurate 
news  of  all  this. 

The  moment  may  have  seemed  to  Cam- 
pion exactly  favourable  for  such  a  strong 
50 


CHEYNEY    AGAIN 

appeal.  One  of  Cheyney's  successors  in  his 
See  declared:  "It  was  certain  he  died  a 
Papist."  This  was  contradicted  by  a  lesser 
authority,  but  yet  a  good  one.  If  it  were 
indeed  *'  certain  ",  at  least  Edmund  Cam- 
pion, to  whom  the  tidings  would  have  been 
most  consoling,  never  knew  of  it.  It  seems 
as  if  Cheyney  could  not  have  answered  that 
bugle-call  of  a  letter.  He  is  said,  however, 
to  have  kept  it  always,  and  to  have  called  it 
his  greatest  treasure. 

How  these  many  cries  of  **  the  heat  of  my 
love"  must  have  haunted  his  earl  It  is 
hardly  in  human  nature  to  value  such  a 
document  at  all  (and  there  are  passages  in 
it  more  ruthless,  after  the  manner  of  the 
time,  than  any  we  have  quoted),  unless  for 
the  reflex  reason  that  it  does  its  intended 
work  in  the  heart  of  the  receiver.  To  have 
valued  it  either  as  a  piece  of  literary  clever- 
ness, or  as  a  monument  of  misdirected  con- 
cern, would  have  been  equally  cynical,  and 
clean  contrary  to  Cheyney's  known  attitude 
towards  his  friend.  He  did  not  live  to  see 
Campion  return  to  England.  Shunning  the 
bigots  and  the  unprincipled  men  in  power 
51 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to  the  last,  and  sheltering  the  Catholics  all 
he  could,  he  shut  himself  up  at  Gloucester, 
a,  whole  High  Church  party  in  himself, 
•wounded  and  at  bay  :  and  there  in  1579  he 
died,  and  was  buried  in  the  glorious 
Cathedral,  without  an  epitaph.  The  dream 
of  his  lifetime,  as  well  as  Edmund  Cam- 
pion's sonship,  he  had  loved  and  lost. 


52 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP   HIGHER  :    DOUAY, 
PRAGUE:    1 571-1573 

IN  Allen's  Apology  for  Seminaries  there 
is  a  beautiful  account  of  the  ideals 
of  Douay.  "The  first  thought  of  the 
founders  of  the  College  had  been  to  attract 
the  young  English  exiles  who  were  living  in 
Flanders  from  their  solitary  and  self-guided 
study  to  a  more  exact  method  and  to  col- 
legiate obedience ;  and  their  next,  to  provide 
for  the  rising  generation  in  England  a  suc- 
cession of  learned  Catholics,  especially  of 
clergy,  to  take  the  place  of  those  removed 
by  old  age,  imprisonment,  and  persecution. 
Their  design  then  was  to  draw  together  out 
of  England  the  *  best  wits  '  from  the  fol- 
lowing classes;  those  inclined  to  Catholic- 
ism ;  those  who  desired  a  more  exact  educa- 
tion than  could  be  then  obtained  at  Oxford 
53 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

or  Cambridge,  *  where  no  art,  holy  or  pro- 
fane, was  thoroughly  studied,  and  some  not 
touched  at  all;'  those  who  were  scrupulous 
about  taking  the  Oath  of  the  Queen's  supre- 
macy; those  who  disliked  to  be  forced,  as 
they  were  in  some  Colleges  of  the  English 
Universities,  to  enter  the  ministry;  .  .  . 
and  those  who  were  doubtful  which  religion 
was  the  true  one,  and  were  disgusted  that 
they  were  forced  into  one  without  being 
allowed  opportunity  of  inquiring  into  the 
other."  The  spirit  of  Douay  was  not  reac- 
tionary, but  the  best  spirit  of  the  English 
Renaissance.  It  had,  besides,  a  character 
or  atmosphere  holy  and  bright,  not  formed 
by  mere  human  culture  :  it  was  as  *'  a  gar- 
den enclosed,  and  a  fountain  sealed."  Cam- 
pion found  there  a  peace  such  as  he  had 
never  known.  He  had  already,  at  Oxford, 
given  seven  years  to  philosophy,  and  six 
more  to  Aristotle,  positive  theology,  and 
the  Fathers.  The  study  of  scholastic  theo- 
logy was  dead  in  Oxford  :  Campion  now 
first  took  up  the  teachings  of  St.  Thomas 
Aquinas.  He  arrived  in  June,  and  in 
August  he  bought  a  noble  edition  of  the 
54 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP  HIGHER 

Summa  for  his  own  use,  in  three  volumes 
foHo.  This  was  discovered  in  1887  by 
Canon  Didiot  of  Lille,  and  it  is  now  at  the 
Roehampton  Noviciate.  Several  features 
make  it  a  particularly  interesting  relic : 
Campion's  signature,  with  the  date  of  his 
purchase,  on  the  flyleaf;  various  beautifully 
executed  little  drawings,  underlinings,  and 
a  host  of  marginal  notes  in  Latin.  By  far 
the  most  touching  of  these  relates  to  what 
St.  Thomas  quotes  from  Gennadius  on  the 
baptism  of  blood.  Blessed  Edmund  Cam- 
pion wrote  in  a  tall,  bold  hand,  over  against 
this  passage,  the  one  musing  word,  "  Mar- 
tyrdom." Canon  Didiot,  with  that  intimate 
touch  of  French  sympathy,  calls  it  ''mot 
radieux  et  prophetique,^^ 

For  nearly  two  years  Campion  followed 
the  course  of  scholastic  theology,  taking  his 
degree  of  Bachelor  in  January,  1573.  He 
then  received  Minor  Orders,  and  was  or- 
dained Sub-deacon.  All  went  happily  for 
him  at  Douay.  He  was  again  at  his  old 
work,  and,  as  ever,  he  won  the  highest 
opinions  from  those  among  whom  he 
moved.  In  his  Oxford  days  he  had  always 
55 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

held  lofty  standards  before  his  pupils : 
"  never  to  deliquesce  into  sloth,  nor  to 
dance  away  your  time,  nor  to  live  for  riot- 
ing and  pleasure  .  .  .  but  to  give  your- 
selves up  to  virtue  and  learning,  and  to 
reckon  this  the  one,  great,  glorious  and 
royal  road."  But  the  feeling  in  the  ex- 
hortations of  his  later  life  is  tenfold  deeper, 
and  strikes  a  far  more  haunting  note  of 
duty  towards  England,  and  towards  the 
Church.  This  is  a  passage  from  the  revised 
De  Juvene  AcademicOy  which  had  first  been 
sketched  out  years  before  in  Dublin. 
*'  Listen  to  our  Heavenly  Father  asking 
back  his  talents  with  usury  !  .  .  .  Behold, 
by  the  wickedness  of  the  wicked  the  house 
of  God  is  devoted  to  flames  and  to  destruc- 
tion ;  numberless  souls  are  being  deceived, 
are  being  shaken,  are  being  lost,  any  one 
of  which  is  worth  more  than  the  empire  of 
the  whole  world.  .  .  .  Sleep  not  while  the 
Enemy  watches;  play  not  while  he  devours 
his  prey;  sink  not  into  idleness  and  folly 
while  his  fangs  are  wet  with  your  brothers' 
blood.  It  is  not  wealth  nor  liberty  norstation, 
but  the  eternal  inheritance  of  each  of  us, 

56 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP  HIGHER 

the  very  life-blood  of  our  souls,  our  spirits, 
and  our  lives,  that  suffers.  See,  then,  my 
dearest  young  scholars  and  friends,  that  we 
lose  none  of  this  precious  time,  but  carry 
hence  a  plentiful  and  rich  crop,  enough  to 
supply  the  public  want,  and  to  gain  for  our- 
selves the  reward  of  dutiful  sons."  One  of 
those  who  listened  to  these  words  was  des- 
tined to  become  the  proto-martyr  of  the 
English  Continental  Seminaries  :  Cuthbert 
Mayne,  a  dear  pupil  of  Campion's,  who  as 
a  Devon  lad  had  come  up  to  Oxford  and  St. 
John's,  had  first  conformed  to  the  new 
regulations,  and  served  as  College  Chaplain, 
then  awakened  from  his  delusion,  and  fled 
over  seas  for  conscience'  sake,  "  not  to 
escape  danger,  but  to  be  prepared  for  it," 
in  response  to  one  of  Campion's  burning 
letters.  This  letter  was  intercepted,  but  its 
purport  had  reached  him,  and  decided  him. 
In  the  spring  of  i57o>  Campion  found 
himself  driven  to  a  course  he  had  not  con- 
templated on  coming  to  Douay.  As  he 
slowly  saw  his  way,  he  followed  it,  to  hori- 
zon beyond  horizon.  He  had  many  steps 
to  take,  because  in  his  thirst  for  perfection 
57 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

he  had  far  to  travel.  He  told  Dr.  Allen 
he  wished  to  leave  his  present  life,  go  on 
pilgrimage,  in  the  spirit  of  penance,  to  the 
Tomb  of  the  Apostles  at  Rome,  and  there 
seek  admission  into  the  Society  of  Jesus. 
The  mediaeval  Orders  would  have  less  at- 
traction for  Campion  :  he  was  an  intensely 
"  modern  "  man.  Now  this  was  a  severe 
blow  to  Allen  :  hardly  less  so  to  others  of 
Campion's  circle.  Campion,  the  pride,  the 
example,  the  hope  of  the  Seminary,  to  quit 
it  for  good,  and  to  quit  it  in  order  to  join 
the  most  recent  of  religious  communities — 
one  which  as  yet  had  few  English  mem- 
bers !  It  was  inexplicable.  But  Allen,  like 
the  great-hearted  and  broad-minded  com- 
mander-in-chief he  was,  let  him  go  without 
protest.  He  little  foresaw  that  far  from 
losing  his  most  promising  champion,  he 
was  but  lending  him  to  better  masters  of 
the  interior  life  than  himself,  and  would 
receive  his  trained  strength  again  in  the 
English  Mission's  spiritual  day  of  battle. 

Campion  set  out  on  foot  across  the  Con- 
tinent for  Rome,  along  that  road  "  trodden 
by  many  a  Saxon  king  and  English  saint, 
58 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP  HIGHER 

to  the  Apostles'  shrine."  His  companions 
walked  with  him  all  the  first  day;  but  the 
next  morning  he  sent  them  back,  and 
pushed  on  alone.  Solitude  was  henceforth 
his  choice,  whenever  duty  permitted.  He 
must  have  had  many  strange  adventures 
during  that  spring  journey.  We  know  of 
one  of  them,  though  not  from  him.  At 
some  point  of  the  route,  probably  on  the 
northern  Italian  border,  he  came  face  to 
face  with  an  old  friend,  an  Oxonian,  and 
a  Protestant.  The  horseman  first  rode  past 
the  poor  mendicant  on  the  highway,  and 
then  was  prompted  by  some  dim  sense  of 
recognition  to  return  and  speak  to  him.  On 
realizing  that  it  was  really  Edmund  Cam- 
pion whom  he  used  to  know  "  in  great 
pomp  of  prosperity,"  he  showed  much  con- 
cern, proffered  his  good-will  and  his  purse, 
and  begged  to  hear  how  Campion  had 
fallen  into  that  ill  plight.  But  the  pilgrim 
refused  aid;  and  the  other  traveller  heard 
something  then  and  there  of  the  '*  contempt 
of  this  world,  and  the  eminent  dignity  of 
serving  Christ  in  poverty,"  which  greatly 
moved  him  :  and  "  us  also,"  adds  Robert 
59 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

Parsons  of  Balliol,  *'  that  remained  yet  in 
Oxford,  when  the  report  came  to  our  ears." 
A  strange  tale  it  must  have  seemed  to  those 
who  knew  their  Master  of  Arts  and  all  his  old 
fastidiousness  I  He  was  by  now  a  saint  in 
the  making,  and  they  were  fast  losing  touch 
with  him.  Personal  holiness  is,  so  to  speak, 
a  mining  country :  its  progress  and  its 
wealth  are  underground,  unguessed-at  by 
the  careless  passer-by.  A  saint  is  a  mys- 
tery because  he  walks  so  closely  in  the 
shadow  of  God,  who  is  the  Great  Mystery. 
When  Campion  reached  Rome,  and  had 
paid  his  devotions  to  the  holy  places,  he 
went  to  call  upon  Cardinal  Gesualdi,  who, 
as  he  stated  afterwards,  *'  having  some 
liking  of  me,  would  have  been  the  means 
to  prefer  me  .  .  .  but  I,  resolved  what 
course  to  take,  answered  that  I  meant  not 
to  serve  any  man,  but  to  enter  into  the 
Society  of  Jesus,  thereof  to  vow  and  to  be 
professed."  With  this  intention,  Campion 
sought  out  the  newly-elected  head  of  that 
Society,  Father  Everard  of  Li^ge,  whose 
surname  was  generally  Latinized  into  Mer- 
curianus,  from  Mercoeur,  his  native  village. 
60 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP  HIGHER 

He  was  fourth  in  his  office,  having  suc- 
ceeded that  great  personality  St.  Francis 
Borgia,  on  St.  George's  Day,  April  23, 
1573.  Biographers  have  represented  that 
Campion  had  a  half-year's  delay  in  Rome 
before  he  was  able  to  apply  for  admission 
to  the  Society;  but  such  was  not  the  case. 
He  promptly  presented  himself,  and  was 
received  as  Mercoeur's  first  recruit,  and 
received  not  as  a  postulant,  but  as  a  novice. 
As  Anthony  Wood  tells  us,  *'  he  was 
esteemed  by  the  General  of  that  Order  to 
be  a  person  every  way  complete."  Four 
years  later,  Campion  most  affectionately 
thanked  his  own  old  tutor,  John  Bavand,  for 
unasked  ''  introductions,  help  and  money," 
which  had  been  supplied  since  he  came  to 
Rome.  He  speaks  of  himself  as  **  one 
whom  you  knew  never  could  repay  you, 
but  who  was  at  the  point,  so  to  speak, 
of  death.  .  .  .  You  were  munificent  to  me 
when  I  was  going  to  enter  the  sepulchral 
rest  of  religion."  The  aid  he  would  not 
accept  for  himself  on  his  journey  from  one 
friend,  he  had  accepted  in  the  city  (and 
spent,  no  doubt,  in  almsgiving)  from  an- 
61 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

other.  Perhaps  Bavand  was  abroad,  and 
heard  of  that  incident  which  came  to  pass 
on  the  road  :  certainly,  he  was  one  from 
whom  Campion  could  not  in  chivalry 
refuse  whatever  he  chose  to  share  with  him» 
The  Society  of  Jesus  had  been  founded 
only  six  years  before  Campion  was  born. 
It  had  as  yet  no  English  '*  Province,*'  that 
is,  no  members  living  under  the  English 
flag  with  a  domestic  government  of  their 
own.  But  Edmund  Campion  was  already 
well  known  to  the  Provincials  on  the  Con- 
tinent, who  had  a  warm  contest  over  him, 
every  one  of  them  wishing  to  add  such  a 
promising  soldier  to  his  own  wing  of  the 
army  of  the  Lord.  As  it  fell  out,  Bohemia 
won.  Campion  was  sent  as  one  of  a  com- 
pany to  Vienna,  and  then  from  Vienna  to 
Prague,  where  the  Noviciate  was,  with 
Father  Avellanedo,  Confessor  to  the  Em- 
press, a  man  of  wide  experience.  He  was 
so  deeply  edified  by  his  companion  that, 
he  told  Fr.  Parsons  long  after,  it  had  kept 
him  all  his  life  "  much  affectioned "  to- 
wards England  and  Englishmen.  Prague 
was  in  a  miserable,  godless  state :  the 
62 


THE  CALL  TO  COME  UP  HIGHER 

Catholics  were  poor  and  few  :  the  great 
University  had  perished  :  and  all  this  was 
due  to  the  ruin,  moral  and  material,  pro- 
duced by  the  preaching,  at  the  dawn  of  the 
fifteenth  century,  of  John  Hus.  That  Hus 
got  his  Socialistic  ideas  from  Wyclif  was  a 
fact  never  out  of  Campion's  mind  while  in 
Bohemia :  for  he  thought  that  England 
owed  some  reparation  to  a  country  which 
she  had  helped  to  spoil,  and  he  was  more 
than  willing  to  pay  his  part  of  that  debt. 


'^-, 


VI 

THE   WISHED-FOR   DAWN  :    BOHEMIA  : 
1573-I579 

CAMPION  stayed  but  two  months  at 
Prague,  as  the  small  Noviciate  was 
removed  to  Briinn  in  Moravia,  where 
the  inhabitants  were  most  hostile  to  Catho- 
licism. The  Bishop  of  Olmiitz  begged  the 
Jesuits  to  help  him  so  far  as  their  Rule  per- 
mitted. Novices  were  sent  out  among  the 
neighbouring  villages,  to  catechize  and  in- 
struct the  poorer  Catholics ;  and  no  one  had 
so  instant  a  success  in  this  little  enterprise 
as  "  God's  Englishman."  At  the  year's 
end  his  Novice  Master,  John  Paul  Cam- 
panus,  became  Rector  of  the  College  in 
Prague,  and  took  Edmund  Campion  back 
with  him.  The  latter  left  a  good  deal  of 
his  heart  within  the  gray  and  austere  walls 
of  Briinn,  as  two  of  his  charming  letters 
show.  In  the  old  garden,  under  a  mul- 
berry tree,  he  had  had  a  wonderful  vision  : 

64 


THE    WISHED-FOR    DAWN 

Our  Lady  stood  there,  smiling  at  him,  and 
offering  him  a  purple  robe.  He  knew  the 
portent  of  martyrdom,  but  for  long  hid  it 
in  his  heart.  At  Prague  Campion  con- 
tinued and  increased  his  Douay  employ- 
ments. He  opened  the  October  term  with 
what  was  called  a  "glorious  peroration". 
As  Professor  of  Rhetoric,  he  wrote,  in  1574, 
a  beautiful  little  treatise  on  that  subject  so 
familiar  to  him.  His  duty  was  to  be  first 
in  the  house  to  rise  and  last  to  go  to  bed; 
he  spent  his  recreation-time  catechizing 
children,  receiving  converts,  visiting  the 
prison  and  the  hospital,  or  helping  the 
cook  in  the  kitchen  !  In  January,  1575,  he 
set  up  at  his  College  a  branch  Confraternity 
of  the  Immaculate  Conception,  or  Sodality 
of  Our  Lady,  of  which  he  became  president. 
About  the  same  time  he  made  his  first 
vows.  He  was  continually  called  upon  for 
great  College  occasions,  and  to  pronounce 
public  panegyrics.  "  Whatever  had  to  be 
done,"  says  his  pompous  but  sympathetic 
biographer  Bombino,  "  was  laid  upon 
him."  On  getting  a  fresh  task  he  would 
ask  his  Superior,  in  a  spirit  of  perfect 
65  F 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

humility  and  confidence,  if  he  was  thought 
strong  enough  to  add  that  to  the  rest?  and 
if  the  answer  were  Yes,  he  shouldered  the 
new    duty   at   once,    much    to   the   wonder 
of  others.     *'  I   am   in   a  continual   bloom 
of  health,"  he  writes  gallantly  to  his  ''  dear- 
est  Parsons,"    who   had   just   entered   the 
Society;    **  I  have  no  time  whatever  to  be 
ill  in!"     Two  sacred  plays  (six  hours  did 
it   take   to   perform   each   of   them  !)    came 
from  Campion's  truly  dramatic  pen  in  1577. 
One  was  on  the  Sacrifice  of  Abraham ;   one 
on   the   melancholy   career  of   King   Saul. 
It  is  a  matter  of  much  regret  that  these  are 
lost.     He    seems    also    to    have    composed 
dialogues  and  scenes  for  his  own  scholars, 
and  to  have  put  together  at  this  same  time 
his   spirited   account  of   the  origin   of   the 
English  schism,   in  a  narrative  (in  Latin) 
of  The  Divorce  of  King  Henry  VIII  from 
his    Wife   and  from   the    Church.     It  was 
printed   by    Harpesfield,    long   after   Cam- 
pion's death. 

Meanwhile    Rudolph    II    had    succeeded 
to  the  imperial  throne;    and  the  ''magni- 
ficently provided  "  Envoy  who  was  sent  to 
66 


THE    WISHED-FOR    DAWN 

Prague,  bearing  the  congratulations  of 
Queen  Elizabeth,  was  none  other  than  Sir 
Philip  Sidney.  Sidney's  mind  was  set 
upon  seeing  his  old  friend  Campion,  and 
talking  with  him ;  but  he  managed  only 
with  difficulty  to  carry  out  his  wishes.  He 
went  officially  in  the  Emperor's  train  to 
hear  his  friend  (not  yet  in  priest's  orders) 
preach,  and  on  his  return  to  England  un- 
guardedly spoke  with  delight  of  the  sermon. 
Whenever  Sidney  visited  the  Continent  he 
was  supposed  to  become  tainted  with  a 
hankering  after  Catholicism,  though  in  all 
his  public  actions  he  was  conspicuously  Pro- 
testant. Campion,  who  knew  him  from  boy- 
hood and  was  not  given  to  misjudgment, 
believed  that  he  had  almost  won  over  the 
star  of  English  chivalry  :  "  this  young  man 
so  wonderfully  beloved  and  admired,"  he 
calls  him  in  1576,  a  testimony  doubly  inter- 
esting, when  we  remember  that  Philip 
Sidney  was  then  but  three-and-twenty,  to 
the  effect  which  his  short  life  made  upon  all 
his  contemporaries.  "  He  had  much  con^ 
versation  with  me, ' '  Campion 's  letter  goes  on,, 
"  and  I  hope  not  in  vain,  for  to  all  appear- 

67 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

ances  he  was  most  keen  about  it.  I  commend 
him  to  your  remembrances  at  Mass,  since 
he  asked  the  prayers  of  all  good  men,  and 
at  the  same  time  put  into  my  hands  alms 
to  be  distributed  to  the  poor  for  him ;  this 
trust  I  have  discharged."  He  ends  by 
hoping  that  some  of  the  missionaries  then 
going  back  to  England  from  Douay  will 
have  ''  opportunity  of  watering  this  plant 
.  .  .  poor  wavering  soul!"  Fr.  Parsons 
in  his  Life  of  Campion  tells  us  that  Sidney 
*'  professed  himself  convinced,  but  said  that 
it  was  necessary  for  him  to  hold  on  the 
course  which  he  had  hitherto  followed." 
Such  was  the  sad  answer  of  Felix  to  St. 
Paul. 

Campion's  thoughts  had  turned  often  of 
■late  to  another  friend,  Gregory  Martin, 
who  had  left  overcrowded  Douay  for  the 
Seminary  newly  founded  in  the  heart  of 
Rome,  in  the  ancient  English  hospice  for 
pilgrims.  Campion  longed  to  turn  his 
fellow-priest  into  a  Jesuit,  for  he  loved  his 
own  Society  in  the  extreme;  but  that  was 
not  to  be.  A  letter  to  Martin,  glowing 
with  that  interior  fire  which  was  shed  out 
68 


THE    WISHED-FOR    DAWN 

from  Edmund  Campion  upon  everything 
he  touched,  ends  most  tenderly.  '*  Since 
for  so  many  years  we  two  had  in  common 
our  College,  our  meals,  our  studies,  our 
friends  and  our  enemies,  let  us  for  the  rest 
of  our  lives  make  a  more  close  and  binding 
union,  that  we  may  have  the  fruit  of  our 
friendship  in  heaven.  For  there  also  I  will, 
if  I  can,  sit  at  your  feet." 

After  years  filled  with  literary  and 
academic  labour  in  two  Colleges,  and 
blessed  with  marked  growth  in  holiness, 
Edmund  Campion  was  ordained  priest  by 
the  Archbishop  of  Prague.  His  first  Mass 
was  said  on  the  Feast  of  the  Nativity  of  Our 
Lady,  September  8,  1578.  Following  his 
General's  express  command,  he  dismissed 
the  old  unhappy  scruple  about  his  Oxford 
diaconate,  and  it  troubled  him  no  more. 
He  was  made  Professor  of  Philosophy. 
"You  are  to  know,"  he  pleasantly  says, 
"  that  I  am  foolishly  held  to  be  an  accom- 
plished sophist!"  During  the  course  of 
this  year  1578,  he  wrote  his  last  and  most 
famous  drama,  now  lost,  on  St.  Ambrose 
and  the  Emperor  Theodosius,  which,  when 

69 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

acted,  made  a  tremendous  stir.  He  became 
ever  more  and  more  noted  as  a  preacher, 
a  *'  sower  of  eternity  "  in  the  popular  heart, 
as  well  as  the  favourite  orator  when 
grandees  died  and  were  buried  in  state. 
But  all  this  time  his  mind  and  heart  were 
far  away. 

No  one  ever  practised  religious  obedience 
in  a  more  heroic  spirit;  yet  he  secretly 
longed  to  throw  his  life  and  his  labours 
directly  into  the  balance  for  England's 
sake.  He  knew  what  was  going  on  there, 
and  his  thoughts  seem  never  once  to  have 
turned  towards  pikes,  or  any  political 
remedy;  his  whole  ambition  was,  as  he 
said  in  one  letter,  to  "torture  our  envious 
foe  with  good  deeds,"  and  in  another,  *'  to 
catch  them  by  the  prayers  and  tears  at 
which  they  laugh."  His  long-dear  Cuth- 
bert  Mayne,  of  whom  he  had  lost  sight  for 
awhile,  had  given  up  his  life  for  the  Faith 
at  Launceston,  November  29,  1577.  He 
had  been  captured  near  Probus ;  his  wealthy 
host,  Francis  Tregian,  was  attainted  of 
praemunire,  and  his  children  completely 
beggared.  This  young  Westcountryman 
70 


THE    WISHED-FOR    DAWN 

had  a  character  all  his  own.  He  had  been 
charged  with  nothing  but  the  exercise  of 
his  priestly  functions,  and  was  offered  his 
life,  on  the  day  of  his  execution,  if  he  would 
but  swear  that  the  Queen  was  Supreme 
Head  of  the  Church  of  England.  "  Upon 
this,"  continues  the  chronicle,  "  he  took  the 
Bible  into  his  hands,  made  the  sign  of  the 
Cross  upon  it,  kissed  it,  and  said  :  '  The 
Queen  neither  ever  was,  nor  is,  nor  ever 
shall  be,  the  Head  of  the  Church  of  Eng- 
land !'  "  Campion  had  only  recently  heard 
the  news  in  the  August  of  1579.  One  can 
read  between  the  lines  of  a  passage  like 
this:  "We  all  thank  you  much  for  your 
account  of  Cuthbert's  martyrdom ;  it  gave 
many  of  us  a  divine  pleasure.  Wretch  that 
I  am,  how  far  has  that  novice  distanced 
me !  May  he  be  favourable  to  his  old 
friend  and  tutor !  Now  shall  I  boast  of 
these  titles  more  than  ever  before."  With- 
in the  next  six  months  Edmund  Campion 
was  to  see  the  beginning  of  his  heart's 
desire. 

Dr.  Allen,  the  founder  of  Douay,  was  in 
Rome  to  organize  the  English  College;  and 
71 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

there  he  brought  all  his  persuasion  to  bear 
upon  the  General  of  the  Society  of  Jesus 
and  his  consultors,  that  the  English  Jesuits 
might  be  allowed  to  join  the  English 
secular  priests  in  the  pressing  redemption 
of  their  distracted  country.  There  were  the 
gravest  reasons  for  and  against  the  pro- 
posal, but  the  answer  given  to  Dr.  Allen 
was  that  the  Society  would  do  its  best  to 
supply  missioners  thenceforward,  and  that 
Robert  Parsons  and  Edmund  Campion 
should  be  sent  first  as  forerunners  of  the 
rest.  Allen  was  naturally  overjoyed.  While 
Mercoeur,  the  Father-General,  wrote  offici- 
ally to  Campion's  Superior  at  Prague, 
Allen  wrote  a  moving  letter  to  Campion 
himself:  "My  father,  brother,  son,"  he 
calls  him,  "  make  all  haste  and  come,  my 
dearest  Campion  .  .  .  from  Prague  to 
Rome,  and  thence  to  our  own  England." 
.  .  .  **  God,  in  whose  hands  are  the  issues, 
has  at  last  granted  that  our  own  Campion, 
with  his  extraordinary  gifts  of  wisdom  and 
grace,  shall  be  restored  to  us.  Prepare 
yourself,  then,  for  a  journey,  for  a  work,  for 
a  trial." 


THE    WISHED-FOR    DAWN 

The  imaginations  of  Campion's  comrades 
at  Prague  were  touched  to  the  quick  by 
the  prospect  opening  before  their  happy 
brother.  One  of  these  bore  witness  to  the 
fragrance  of  his  own  thoughts  by  painting 
a  garland  of  roses  and  lilies  on  the  wall  of 
Campion's  little  room,  just  at  the  bed's 
head.  A  white-haired  Silesian,  Father 
James  Gall,  wrote  in  scroll  fashion,  by 
night,  over  the  outer  door  of  that  same 
little  room:  "  P[ater]  Edmundus  Cam- 
pianus.  Martyr."  For  such  a  romantic 
irregularity  the  old  saint  was  reprimanded. 
He  replied  quite  simply  :  "  But  I  had  to 
do  it !"  Poor  Campion,  who  was  shy,  had 
seen  both  these  things,  before  Campanus, 
the  sympathetic  Rector,  gave  him  his 
marching  orders  to  start  at  once  for  Rome. 
'*  The  Fathers  do  verily  seem  to  suspect 
something  about  me ;  I  hope  their  suspicions 
may  come  true!"  he  said.  "God's  will 
be  done,  not  mine."  And  then,  adds  that 
first  English  biographer  who  so  well  knew 
him  and  so  much  loved  him :  "  Being 
scarce  able  to  hold  tears  for  joy  and  tender- 
ness of  heart,  he  went  to  his  chamber,  and 
73 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

there  upon  his  knees  to  God  satisfied  his 
appetite  of  weeping  and  thanksgiving,  and 
offered  himself  to  His  divine  disposition 
without  any  exception  or  restraint :  whether 
it  were  to  rack,  cross-quartering,  or  any- 
other  torment  or  death  whatsoever.*' 


74 


VII 

A    LONG    MARCH  :    ROME,    GENEVA, 
RHEIMS  :     1580 

FROM  Prague  to  Munich,  and  from 
Munich  to  Innsbriick,  Campion  had 
the  distinguished  and  very  friendly 
company  of  Ferdinand,  brother  of  the 
reigning  Duke  of  Bavaria.  Afterwards  he 
went  on  alone  on  foot,  as  he  was  always 
glad  to  do,  as  far  as  Padua.  Here  he  took 
horse  for  Rome,  which  he  reached  just  be- 
fore Palm  Sunday,  April  5,  1580,  coming 
*'  in  grave  priest's  garb,"  we  are  told, 
**  with  long  hair,  after  the  fashion  of  Ger- 
many." He  was  informed  by  the  Father- 
General  that  he  was  to  start  for  England 
nine  or  ten  days  after  Easter.  Campion 
begged  "  neither  to  be  Superior  of  the  ex- 
pedition nor  to  have  anything  to  do  with 
the  preparations,"  and  that  during  the  fort- 
night he  might  be  free  from  all  except 
75 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

necessary  cares,  in  order  to  make  a  more 
devotional  entrance  upon  the  life  ahead  of 
him.  "And  the  like  did,  for  their  part, 
and  had  done,  all  the  Lent  before,  those 
other  priests  also  of  the  English  Semi- 
nary," says  Parsons,  speaking  of  many 
seculars  afterwards  martyred,  "that  were 
appointed  by  their  Superiors  to  go  with  us 
in  this  mission.  ...  All  these  together 
used  such  notable  and  extraordinary  dili- 
gence for  preparing  themselves  well  in  the 
sight  of  God  ...  as  was  matter  of  edifica- 
tion to  all  Rome.'* 

Rome  was  a  most  religious  place  at  thai 
time,  not  onlv  in  its  enduring  associations, 
but  in  the  temper  of  the  people.  One  in  large 
measure  responsible  for  its  spirit  of  penance 
and  prayer,  and  loving  charity  to  the  poor, 
was  then  living  at  San  Girolamo,  opposite 
the  old  English  hospital,  now  turned  into 
a  College  :  this  w^as  St.  Philip  Neri,  the 
most  venerated  and  endearing  figure  in  all 
the  great  city.  He  knew  the  successive 
little  English  bands;  when  he  passed  them 
in  the  streets,  cheerful  St.  Philip  used  to 
smile  tenderly,   and  give  what  must  have 

76 


A    LONG    MARCH 

been  to  them  a  thrilling  greeting :  "  '  Hail, 
Little  Flowers  of  Martyrdom  !'  "  the  open- 
ing line  of  the  Breviary  Hymn  for  Holy 
Innocents'  Day.  Parsons  and  Campion, 
and  the  secular  clerics  associated  with  them, 
may  have  originated  the  custom  of  going 
over  to  San  Girolamo  for  a  special  fatherly 
blessing  before  setting  forth  to  almost  cer- 
tain death.  There  is  a  tradition  (mentioned 
by  Newman)  that  one  of  that  company  did 
not  care  to  seek  St.  Philip's  prayers, 
and  that  afterwards  he  failed  to  persevere. 
This  is  thought  to  be  the  lay  student,  John 
Paschall,  or  Pascal,  who  was  apparently  of 
an  unstable  disposition,  and  is  known  to 
have  forsworn  the  Faith,  when  his  great 
chance  came  to  profess  it. 

The  Pope,  Gregory  XIII,  showed  untiring 
and  fatherly  interest  in  all  the  missionaries, 
and  their  travelling  funds  were  his  personal 
gift.  He  wept  over  them  in  bestowing  his 
parting  benediction.  Campion  set  out  this 
time  with  seven  English  priests,  Ralph 
Sherwin,  a  former  Fellow  of  Exeter  Col- 
lege, among  them;  also  with  two  lay 
brothers,  and  two  students.  Others  joined 
77 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

them  from  Rheims  and  Louvain,  some  of 
them  advanced  in  years  and  well  known. 
The  party  adopted  the  novel  and  almost 
daredevil  fashion  of  going  on  foot;  but, 
mounted  and  riding  privately  in  advance  of 
it,  were  its  two  eldest  members.  One  was 
the  holy  octogenarian  Thomas  Goldwell, 
the  Lord  Bishop  of  St.  Asaph,  who  had 
been  offered  by  Queen  Mary  a  transfer  to 
the  See  of  Oxford,  and  refused  it.  He  was 
destined  to  be  the  last  survivor  of  the  de- 
posed and  scattered  Catholic  hierarchy  in 
England,  who  had  all  but  one  refused  the 
unheard-of  Oath  in  1559,  and  had  all  been 
deprived  of  their  Sees  that  same  year. 
Bishop  Goldwell  now,  twenty  years  after- 
wards, was  one  of  two  who  were  living; 
and  his  colleague,  Watson,  Bishop  of 
Lincoln,  was  in  prison.  The  other  senior 
missionary  was  his  companion,  Dr.  Nicholas 
Morton,  Canon  Penitentiary  of  St.  Peter's, 
who  had  done  something  already  towards 
the  making  of  English  history.  The  first 
little  Jesuit  group  of  three  was  commanded 
by  Fr.  Robert  Parsons,  a  born  organizer, 
a  man  of  splendid  resources,  afterwards 
78 


A    LONG    MARCH 

celebrated,  and  much  loved  and  hated.  For 
convenience,  as  for  safety,  they  all  put  on 
secular  dress.  Campion,  however,  would 
buy  no  new  clothes,  but  arrayed  himself  in 
an  old  buckram  suit,  with  a  shabby  cloak. 
When  rallied  on  his  highly  inelegant  ap- 
pearance, he  remarked  with  the  gay  spirit 
so  like  that  of  another  "blissful  martyr,'* 
Sir  Thomas  More,  that  a  man  going  forth 
to  be  hanged  need  trouble  himself  little 
about  the  fashion  ! 

The  roads  were  bad  beyond  any  modern 
idea  of  badness,  and  it  poured  rain  for  the 
first  nine  or  ten  days.  Campion,  the  least 
robust  of  the  party,  and  the  most  poorly 
clad,  fell  ill  under  such  combined  discom- 
forts, and  while  crossing  the  Apennines  had 
to  be  lifted  into  the  saddle  of  one  of  the 
very  few  horses  which  had  been  brought 
along  for  the  sake  of  the  infirm.  As  soon 
as  he  was  well  enough  he  resumed  his  daily 
habit  of  saying  Mass  very  early,  and  of 
walking  on,  in  the  later  morning  hours,  till 
he  was  a  mile  ahead  of  the  rest,  to  make 
his  meditation,  read  his  Office,  and  say  the 
Litany  of  the  Saints,  before  he  should  be 
79 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

overtaken.  He  and  his  comrades  planned 
their  spiritual  life,  day  by  day,  with  the 
most  careful  regularity.  Their  talk  was 
always  of  souls  :  "the  Harvest  "  was  their 
word  for  England,  or  else  "  the  Warfare." 
In  the  chilly  spring  twilights  Campion 
would  push  on  ahead  again,  "  to  make  his 
prayers  alone,  and  utter  his  zealous  affec- 
tions to  his  Saviour  without  being  heard 
or  noted." 

The  route  lay  through  Siena,  Florence, 
Bologna.  In  the  latter  city  there  was  a 
week's  delay,  due  to  an  injury  to  Fr.  Par- 
sons' leg.  The  band  of  twelve  was  enter- 
tained by  the  Cardinal  Archbishop  of  that 
See,  who  was  the  historian  of  the  Council 
of  Trent :  Gabriel  Paleotto.  Like  Avella- 
nedo,  like  many  another  Italian,  Paleotto 
loved  the  English.  ''  Were  he  a  born  Eng- 
lishman, he  could  not  love  them  more," 
wrote  Agazzario  to  Allen,  at  that  time  when 
the  national  temperament  was  much  more 
expressive  and  responsive  than  it  is  now. 
At  Milan,  in  the  early  part  of  May,  the 
future  confessors  and  martyrs  were  to  find 
another  and  a  greater,  also  "  much  affec- 
80 


"  P(ater)  Edmundus  Campianus,  Martyr." 


D  7.3. 


A    LONG    MARCH 

tioned  "  towards  them,  who  received  them 
most  hospitably,  and  even  asked  the  Eng- 
lish College  for  other  relays  of  guests  in 
the  future.  This  was  the  great  Archbishop, 
St.  Charles  Borromeo.  Bishop  Goldwell, 
who  had  passed  through  Milan  days  before 
the  walkers  reached  it,  had  been,  in  1563, 
Vicar-General  to  St.  Charles,  and  would 
have  bespoken  his  interest  in  the  little 
party.  The  reverend  host  complimented 
Ralph  Sherwin  by  asking  him  to  deliver  a 
sermon  before  him,  and  as  for  Campion, 
he  was  required  to  discourse  daily  after 
dinner.  St.  Charles  himself,  all  the  while, 
whether  vocal  or  silent,  was  acting  upon  the 
pilgrims  as  a  Sursum  corda.  "  Without 
saying  a  word,  he  preached  to  us  suffi- 
ciently,"  says  the  ever-appreciative  Par- 
sons, "  and  so  we  departed  from  him 
greatly  edified  and  exceedingly  animated." 
How  charming  is  the  forgotten  use  of  the 
last  word,  meaning  "souled,"  or,  as  we 
still  say,  "  heartened,"  ''  inspirited  !"  Such 
indeed  is  the  true  function  of  the  saints. 

From  Turin  the  little  company  made  for 
Mount  Cenis,  and  young,  middle-aged  and 

81  G 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

old  lustily  climbed  it;  and  then  among  the 
torrents  and  boulders  of  that  glorious 
scenery,  they  came  down  into  Savoy.  At 
St.  Jean  Maurienne  they  found  the  roads 
blocked  by  the  Spanish  soldiery,  and  at 
Aiguebelle  ran  across  other  disturbances, 
caused  by  the  wars  of  religion  raging  in 
the  Dauphine.  As  there  was  nothing  to  do 
but  abandon  the  direct  route,  they  turned 
aside  and  entered  Geneva,  the  hotbed  of 
Calvinism,  and  the  home  of  Theodore 
Beza,  the  learned  apostate  who  had  suc- 
ceeded to  Calvin's  leadership.  There  was 
a  close  community  of  spirit  between  Geneva 
and  the  English  Reformation.  However, 
Switzerland,  then  as  now,  had  liberal  laws, 
and  any  traveller.  Catholic  or  Protestant, 
was  free  to  pass,  unmolested  though  not 
unquestioned,  three  days  in  the  city.  It 
looks  decidedly  like  an  alloy  of  mischief  on 
the  part  of  five  of  the  English  that  they 
went  to  call  in  a  body  on  Beza !  They 
were  admitted  as  far  as  the  court  by 
Claudine,  his  stolen  wife,  whom  they 
had  all  heard  of,  and  were  not  ill-pleased 
to  see.  When  the  famous  greybeard 
82 


A    LONG    MARCH 

came  out  they  managed,  after  passing 
their  compliments,  to  worry  him  with 
some  telHng  controversial  shots.  Campion 
knew  not  how  to  be  rude  :  but  Sherwin 
found  amusement,  ever  afterwards,  in  re- 
membering how  that  honest  fellow  "  Pat- 
rick "  stood  and  looked  and  talked,  cap  in 
hand,  "facing  out"  (such  is  Sherwin's 
shockingly  boyish  language  in  a  private 
letter),  *'  the  old  doting  heretical  fool.'* 
The  celebrity  so  described  behaved  rather 
vaguely,  and,  in  the  course  of  nature,  could 
not  have  been  sorry  to  see  the  last  of  his 
besiegers,  and  of  their  wits,  sharpened  with 
life  in  the  open  air.  He  bowed  them  out 
with  less  abruptness  than  might  have  been 
expected — indeed,  with  a  certain  show  of 
civility ;  and  went  back  to  his  books.  Later> 
Sherwin  and  two  other  youngsters,  in  a 
midnight  discussion  with  some  English 
Protestant  students,  actually  challenged 
Beza  and  all  Calvindom  to  a  trial  of  theo- 
logies, with  the  drastic  proviso  that  the  de- 
feated party  should  be  burnt  in  the  market- 
place !  Meanwhile  Campion,  in  the  role  of 
"  Patrick,"  did  his  share  of  "  facing  out  "' 
^3 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

other  worthies  in  Geneva,  besides  finding 
an  old  University  friend  there,  who  '*  used 
him  lovingly,"  but  reported  that  an  alarm 
had  been  raised,  and  encouraged  the  de- 
parture of  the  paladins.  These,  halting  on 
a  spur  of  the  Jura  before  nightfall,  with 
Lake  Leman  spread  beneath  them,  said 
Te  Deum  together,  that  they  were  safely 
out  of  the  city.  There  seems  to  have  been 
a  good  deal  of  curiosity  or  bravado  mingled 
with  their  polemical  zeal,  and  Campion's 
always  tender  conscience  would  have  readily 
accepted,  if  it  did  not  suggest,  a  suitable 
penance  for  the  raid.  So  off  they  trudged 
nine  steep,  contrite,  extra  miles  ('*  extreme 
troublesome,"  we  are  told  they  were)  to 
the  nearest  shrine,  that  of  St.  Claude,  over 
the  French  border. 

They  entered  Rheims  the  last  day  of 
May,  1580,  for  in  Rheims  was  the  soul,  if 
not  the  body,  of  the  College  now  driven, 
partly  for  convenience,  partly  by  force  of 
trouble,  out  of  Douay.  That  College  was 
never  re-formed :  but  the  scholar-exiles 
lived  close  together,  up  and  down  the  street 
still  called  Rue  des  Anglais,    The  travellers 

84 


A    LONG    MARCH 

were  rapturously  welcomed  by  all,  especi- 
ally by  the  great  Englishman  whom  the  old 
narrative  quaintly  calls  ''  Mr.  Dr.  Allen, 
the  President."  Here  at  Rheims  the  vener- 
able Bishop  of  St.  Asaph  fell  ill  of  a  fever. 
He  was  never  again  to  cross  the  Channel. 
By  the  time  he  had  fairly  recovered, 
rumours  of  his  movements  had  naturally 
got  abroad,  and  the  Pope  was  unwilling  to 
imperil  so  important  and  precious  a  person. 
While  still  a  convalescent  at  Rheims,  Gold- 
well  wrote  to  his  Holiness  in  person, 
begging  him  to  listen  to  no  objections,  but 
to  anoint  at  once  three  or  four  new  Bishops 
to  shepherd  their  own  needy  Church;  and 
he  very  touchingly  assures  the  Holy  Father, 
knowing  that  the  question  of  a  fitting  main- 
tenance for  them  would  arise,  that  God  had 
so  inclined  the  minds  of  all  the  English 
priests  whom  he  knew  to  put  up  with  their 
penniless  and  hunted  daily  lives,  and  the 
vision  of  the  gallows  always  before  them, 
that  any  of  these,  once  consecrated,  would 
be  entirely  contented  to  go  on  as  poorly  as 
he  had  gone  heretofore,  like  a  Bishop  of 
the  Early  Church.  The  application  failed. 
85 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

''Etiquette   and    routine    prevailed,"    says 
Simpson,   in  summing  up  this  incident. 

In  truth,  it  was  not  that  good-will  was 
lacking.  Nobody  on  the  Catholic  side  be- 
lieved that  the  new  sad  order  of  things  in 
England  was  going  to  last,  and  conse- 
quently, waiting  and  postponing  in  a  mat- 
ter of  this  sort,  could  not  seem  the  disastrous 
mistake  which  it  really  was.  The  upshot, 
in  any  case,  was  that  the  good  Bishop  was 
recalled  to  Rome,  and  there  died;  and  that 
for  thirty  weary  years  the  poor  flock  strug- 
gled on  without  any  qualified  prelate  to 
supply  their  crying  spiritual  wants  and  hold 
them  together.  Then  the  first  provisional 
leader,  known  as  the  Archpriest,  was  ap- 
pointed, and  later  came  Vicars  Apostolic. 
When  finally  the  longed-for  mitres  were 
seen  again  in  the  land,  they  had  been 
absent  too  long.  The  nominal  link  snapped; 
the  great  native  tradition  was  broken ;  the 
titles  of  the  ancient  Sees,  given  up,  as  if  in 
sleep,  by  their  lineal  heirs,  were  never  re- 
claimed. So  far  as  surface  connection  goes, 
— and  it  goes  far  indeed  with  people  in 
general,  who  neither  reason  nor  read,  but 
86 


A   LONG    MARCH 

get  all  their  ideas  from  what  they  see  and 
hear,  this  was  the  most  tragic  loss  which 
could  possibly  have  befallen  the  post- 
Reformation  Church.  (The  English  Bene- 
dictines kept  the  thread  of  their  own 
dynasty  in  their  hands  :  but  this  did  not 
affect  the  Catholic  body,  and  the  lay  inter- 
est.) The  stranger  who  could  not  destroy 
the  life  and  blessing  of  the  firstborn  has 
had  possession,  for  three  centuries  and  a 
half,  by  royal  grant,  of  his  home  and  of 
his  very  name. 


87 


VIII 

INHOSPITABLE   HOME  :     1580 

SIR  FRANCIS  WALSINGHAM  had 
a  wonderfully  well-organized  spy- 
system  :  far  superior,  as  Simpson  re- 
marks, to  the  attempts  of  the  Spaniards  in 
the  same  line.  Therefore  each  of  the  mis- 
sionaries was  cautioned  to  travel  under  a 
name  other  than  his  own.  Campion  fell  back 
upon  his  beloved  alias  of  "  Mr.  Patrick,"  as 
he  had  done  for  the  brief  visit  to  Geneva. 
His  friends  made  him  drop  it,  as  they  neared 
the  Channel ;  being  Irish,  it  was  doubly  dan- 
gerous, since  here  at  Rheims  the  home-goers 
got  their  first  tardy  news  of  the  so-called 
Geraldine  insurrection  in  Ireland,  acted 
upon  in  July,  1579,  and  crushed  almost  as 
soon  by  the  massacre  at  Smerwick  in  Kerry. 
It  had  been  nursed  by  European  feeling 
against  Elizabeth's  policy  in  Flanders,  and 
her  piracies  on  the  high  seas ;  and  the  great 
88 


INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

religious  grudge  found  it  a  convenient  open- 
ing. Dr.  Nicholas  Sander,  who  was  not  a 
Papal  Legate,  but  stood  none  the  less  for 
the  Pope's  active  good-will  in  the  matter, 
joined  the  expedition  with  James  Fitz- 
maurice,  Spanish  soldiers,  Roman  officers, 
ships  and  supplies.  That  expedition  did  not, 
as  we  know,  dislodge  Jezebel  from  her 
throne,  but  it  gave  sufficient  heartbreak  to 
our  messengers  of  the  Gospel  of  Peace,  who 
were  now  sure  to  be  mixed  up  with  it  in  the 
popular  mind.  The  situation  was  certainly 
an  awkward  one.  It  gave  unique  plausi- 
bility to  Walsingham's  claim  that  (to  quote 
Fr.  Pollen)  "  the  preaching  of  the  old  Faith 
was  only  a  political  propaganda."  Father 
Robert  Parsons  faced  the  future,  on  behalf 
of  the  rest,  in  the  spirit  of  a  brave  man. 
"  Seeing  that  it  lay  not  in  our  hands  to 
remedy  the  matter,  our  consciences  being 
clear,  we  resolved  ourselves,  with  the 
Apostle,  *  through  evil  report  and  good 
report '  to  go  forward  only  with  the  spirit- 
ual action  we  had  in  hand.  And  if  God  had 
appointed  that  any  of  us  should  suffer  in 
England  under  a  wrong  title,  as  Himself 

89 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

did  upon  the  case  of  a  malefactor,  we  should 
lose  nothing  thereby,  but  rather  gain  with 
Him  who  knew  the  truth,  and  Whom  only 
in  this  enterprise  we  desired  to  please." 

Danger  was  a  spur  and  not  a  bridle  to 
Campion's  devoted  will.  But  he  began  to 
foresee  little  fruit  from  labours  on  his  native 
ground,  with  so  much  fierce  misunderstand- 
ing against  him ;  and  to  fear  that  he  had  not 
done  well  in  so  gladly  laying  down  what 
was,  after  all,  steady  and  successful  work  in 
Bohemia.  With  this  buzzing  scruple  he 
went  to  the  President  for  advice.  Allen  re- 
plied that  the  work  in  "  Boemeland,"  excel- 
lent at  all  points  as  it  had  been,  yet  could 
be  done  by  any  equally  qualified  person,  or 
**  at  least  by  two  or  three  "  such  persons, 
whereas  in  his  own  necessitous  England 
Campion  would  be  given  strength  and  grace 
to  supply  for  many  men. 

At  Rheims,  during  his  waiting-time, 
Campion  preached  one  of  his  famous  ser- 
mons to  the  students.  It  gave  him  a  pathetic 
pleasure  to  be  complimented  upon  his  ready 
English,  of  which  he  had  spoken  little  in 
private,  and  not  a  word  in  public,  for  eight 
90 


INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

years.  His  text  is  reported  to  have  been 
Luke  xii.  49  :  "I  am  come  to  send  fire  upon 
the  earth ;  and  what  will  I  but  that  it  shall 
be  kindled?"  and  at  one  point  he  cried  out 
in  so  earnest  a  manner:  ''Fire,  fire,  fire, 
fire  !"  that  those  outside  the  Chapel  ran  for 
the  water-buckets  !  But  a  careful  reading 
of  what  was  then  spoken  suggests  quite  a 
different  passage  of  Holy  Scripture  as  pre- 
sent in  Campion's  mind.  His  theme  was 
the  ruin  wrought  by  the  conflagration  of 
heresy,  now  attacking  a  third  generation  of 
Christian  souls,  and  to  be  put  out,  he  says, 
by  **  water  of  Catholic  doctrine,  milk  of 
sweet  and  holy  conversation,  blood  of  potent 
martyrdom."  Isaiah  Ixiv.  11,  runs:  "Our 
holy  and  our  beautiful  house  where  our 
fathers  praised  Thee,  is  burned  up  with  fire  ; 
and  all  our  pleasant  things  are  laid  waste." 
This  very  passage  had  been  alluded  to  in 
one  of  Campion's  former  exhortations,  and 
may  have  been  a  favourite  with  him.  The 
whole  trend,  indeed,  and  every  part  of  this 
Rheims  sermon  bear  out  the  thoughts  not 
of  the  Apostle's  page,  but  of  the  Prophet's. 
Bishop  Goldwell  and  Dr.  Morton,  the 
91 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

highest  in  office  of  the  missionary  party,  re- 
mained at  Rheims.  Three  Englishmen,  a  lay 
Professor  of  Law,  and  two  priests,  joined  in, 
to  fill  up  the  gap,  then  another  Jesuit,  who 
had  been  labouring  in  Poland  :  this  was  Fr. 
Thomas  Cottam,  ordered  home  to  restore  his 
health,  but  destined,  as  were  so  many  of  his 
comrades,  for  martyrdom.  The  little  band 
of  fifteen  divided,  and  sailed  from  different 
ports  :  Campion,  with  Parsons  and  one  lay 
brother,  Ralph  Emerson,  headed  for  Calais 
as  their  point  of  departure,  going  by  way  of 
St.  Omers,  "  not  a  little  encouraged  to  think 
that  the  first  mission  of  St.  Augustine  and 
his  fellows  into  [our]  island  was  by  that 
city."  Here  there  was  another  Jesuit  Col- 
lege. The  Flemish  Fathers  croaked  friendly 
warnings  in  their  ears,  for  it  was  common 
rumour  in  St.  Omers  that  the  Queen's 
Council  had  full  information  of  the  appear- 
ance, dress  and  movements  of  the  exiles, 
and  had  officers  posted  to  waylay  them  on 
arrival.  They  had  come  on  foot  nearly  nine 
hundred  miles,  and  were  not  likely  to  give 
up  the  object  of  their  journey.  But  they 
took  precautions.  It  was  decided  that 
92 


INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

Parsons  should  go  first,  in  military  attire, 
accompanied  from  the  Low  Countries  by  a 
good  youth  who  passed  as  his  man  George ; 
and  that  if  Parsons  got  safely  to  Dover,  he 
was  to,  send  for  Campion  and  the  faithful 
little  soul  Ralph  Emerson.  An  English 
gentleman  "living  over  seas  for  his  con- 
science," brought  Fr.  Parsons  his  fine  dis- 
guise: nothing  less  than  a  Captain's  uni- 
form of  buff  leather,  with  gold  lace,  big 
boots,  sword,  hat,  plume,  and  all.  Campion, 
when  he  had  gone,  sat  down  to  write  to  the 
General  of  the  Society  about  him,  with  his 
inevitably  pictorial  touch.  ''  Father  Robert 
sailed  from  Calais  after  midnight.  .  .  .  They 
got  him  up  like  a  soldier :  such  a  peacock  ! 
such  a  swaggerer!  .  .  .  such  duds,  such  a 
glance,  such  a  strut !  A  man  must  have  a 
sharp  eye  indeed,"  he  adds,  *'  to  catch  any 
glimpse  of  the  holiness  and  modesty  that 
lurk  there  underneath  it  all."  He  goes  on  to 
explain  how  he  is  laying  out  money  to  buy 
numerous  and  silly  clothes  ''to  dress  up 
myself  and  Ralph,"  whereby  ''  to  cheat  the 
madness  of  this  world."  Fr.  Parsons,  like 
Campion  himself  in  lesser  roleSy  must  have 
93 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

been  a  dramatic  genius,  for  arriving  at 
Dover  on  the  12th  of  June,  and  falling  into 
the  hands  of  the  searcher,  he  so  won  him 
over,  by  the  mere  swagger  and  strut  afore- 
mentioned, as  not  only  to  be  passed  without 
inquiry,  but  to  be  helped  to  a  horse  to  carry 
him  to  Gravesend.  Thereupon  the  Captain 
was  quick  to  bespeak  the  interest  of  so  un- 
expectedly polite  a  functionary  in  his  friend 
**  Mr.  Edmunds,"  described  as  a  jewel- 
merchant  lying  at  St.  Omers;  and  he  gave 
the  searcher  a  letter  recommending  London 
as  a  good  market,  to  be  forwarded  post-haste 
to  that  gentleman,  and  to  be  shown  to  the 
searcher  again  by  "  Mr.  Edmunds  "  him- 
self when  he  came  over.  And  by  the  recep- 
tion of  that  letter  Campion  learned  that  Fr. 
Parsons  was  scot-free,  and  speeded  on  his 
way. 

On  the  Feast  of  his  old  College  patron, 
St.  John  the  Baptist,  "  Mr.  Edmunds,"  fol- 
lowed by  Brother  Ralph,  his  supposed  ser- 
vant, boarded  the  vessel  bound  for  Dover. 
At  daybreak  they  stepped  ashore  under  the 
white  cliffs,  and  there  kneeling  a  moment  in 
the  shadow  of  a  rock.  Campion  renewed  his 
94 


INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

offering  of  himself,  without  reserve  or  con- 
dition, to  the  God  of  Hosts,  for  the  dark 
"  warfare  "  which  lay  before  him. 

Meanwhile,  the  dispositions  of  the 
searcher  (who  evidently  put  in  no  appear- 
ance) had  undergone  a  forced  change.  He 
and  the  Mayor  of  the  town  had  been  repri- 
manded by  the  Council  for  letting  Papists 
slip  through  their  nets.  Moreover,  there 
had  been  furnished,  by  a  spy,  a  detailed 
description  of  Cardinal  Allen's  brother,  who 
was  about  to  pass  through  Dover  on  his  way 
to  relatives  in  Lancashire;  and  as  Gabriel 
Allen  and  Edmund  Campion  looked  very 
much  alike,  our  jewel-merchant  found  him- 
self instantly  under  arrest.  With  an  accu- 
racy which  he  was  not  in  the  least  aware  of, 
the  Mayor  charged  him  and  the  lay  brother 
of  being  "  foes  to  the  Queen's  religion  and 
friends  to  the  old  Faith ;  with  sailing  under 
false  names,  and  with  returning  for  the  pur- 
pose of  propagating  Popery."  Campion 
offered  to  swear  that  he  was  not  Gabriel 
Allen,  but  offered  in  vain.  The  Mayor  held 
a  hasty  conference,  and  ordered  a  mounted 
guard  to  carry  both  prisoners  up  to  Sir 
95 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

Francis  Walsingham  and  the  Council.  All 
this  time,  Campion  was  praying  to  God  for 
deliverance,  and  earnestly  begging  St.  John 
the  Baptist  to  intercede  for  himself  and  his 
companion.  They  were  waiting  near  the 
closed  door  of  a  room.  "Suddenly," 
wrote  Campion  himself  long  after,  to  the 
Father-General,  "  suddenly  cometh  forth  an 
old  man  :  God  give  him  grace  for  his  pains  ! 
'Well,'  quoth  he,  'it  is  agreed  you  shall 
be  dismissed  :  fare  ye  well.'  "  After  which 
the  two  Jesuits  left  without  further  notice 
or  opposition,  and  travelled  as  fast  as  ever 
they  could  to  London. 

Fr.  Parsons  had  reached  the  city  not  with- 
out adventure,  but  without  mishap,  a  fort- 
night before.  Yet  as  no  word  had  been 
received  since  from  him,  Campion  had  no 
idea  how  to  proceed  or  whither  to  go;  nor 
could  he  inquire  without  arousing  suspicion. 
Fortunately  Parsons  had  given  to  some 
w^atchful  young  Catholics  a  description  of 
the  jewel-merchant  and  his  man  :  Ralph 
Emerson  was  easily  recognizable  on  account 
of  his  extremely  short  stature.  Thus  they 
had  hardly  touched  the  wharf  at  the  Hythe 

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INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

before  a  stranger,  Thomas  Jay,  stepped  to 
the  gangway,  with  a  welcoming  gesture, 
saying:  "Mr.  Edmunds,  give  me  your 
hand  :  I  stay  here  for  you,  to  lead  you  to 
your  friends."  Under  this  guidance  Cam- 
pion reached  London  and  Chancery  Lane, 
where  he  was  clothed  and  armed,  and  pro- 
vided with  a  horse.  He  must  have  been 
astonished  to  learn  under  whose  roof  he  was 
so  safe  and  so  comfortable  :  for  it  was  none 
other  than  that  of  the  chief  pursuivant ! 
Here  was,  indeed,  a  case  of  the  bird  nesting 
in  the  cannon's  mouth.  St.  Augustine 
warns  us  that  we  are  not  to  think  that 
ungodly  men  are  kept  in  this  world  for 
nothing,  nor  that  God  has  no  good  pur- 
poses of  His  own  to  fulfil  through  them. 
One  cause  of  the  miraculous  preservation  of 
the  ancient  Faith  under  Elizabeth  lay  in  the 
fact  that  many  an  official,  high  and  low,  of 
that  time-serving  Government,  was  in  the 
pay  of  the  Recusant  gentry.  A  strange  situ- 
ation it  was,  and  by  no  means  an  infrequent 
one,  when  some  of  these,  brought  before  the 
magistrates,  would  be  discharged  on  the 
assurance  of  the  bought-over  official  that  the 
97  H 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

prisoner  was  *'  an  honest  gentleman  "  :  thus 
averting  all  suspicion  from  the  latter  for  the 
time  being. 

The  band  of  lay  Catholics,  some  of  whom 
Campion  had  known  from  boyhood,  like 
Henry  Vaux  and  Richard  Stanihurst,  were 
acting  as  friends,  freely  leagued  together,  as 
occasion  arose,  for  the  helping  of  priests, 
and  the  furthering  of  religion.  Their  time, 
their  thoughts,  their  self-sacrifice,  their 
purses,  were  at  the  service  particularly  of 
the  Jesuits,  persons  habitually  being 
described  by  Sir  Walter  Mildmay  in  the 
Star  Chamber  as  "lewd  runagates,"  "a 
sort  of  hypocrites,"  "a  rabble  of  vagrant 
friars."  The  leader  of  them  all,  in  his  in- 
spiring zeal,  though  not  highest  in  station, 
was  George  Gilbert,  a  rich  young  squire 
owning  estates  (which  were  confiscated  in 
the  end)  in  Buckinghamshire  and  Suffolk. 
He  was  a  convert,  a  great  rider  and  athlete, 
dear  to  many ;  but  in  secret  a  lover  of  apos- 
tolic poverty,  living  for  others  :  in  short,  a 
saint.  He  spent  himself  to  the  last  breath 
for  the  Faith  as  truly  as  if  he  had  perished 
at  Tyburn   Tree.    In   banishment,    he   still 

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INHOSPITABLE    HOME 

served  the  same  cause  by  his  forethought 
and  his  generosity  in  the  use  of  such  worldly 
goods  as  were  left  to  him  :  for  he  became 
responsible,  at  Rome,  for  the  series  of  paint- 
ings of  the  English  martyrdoms  which  gave 
their  chief  historical  standing  to  the  Beati- 
fications of  1886.  Thus  Gilbert,  living  and 
dead,  was  Blessed  Edmund  Campion's 
availing  friend  and  lover. 


99 


IX 


SKIRMISHING  :    THE   ENGLISH   COUNTIES  : 
1580 

THE  devoted  George  Gilbert,  his 
fellowship  of  young  men,  and 
those  whom  they  gathered  to- 
gether, met  on  the  Feast  of  SS.  Peter  and 
Paul,  June  29,  to  hear,  for  the  first  time, 
Fr.  Campion  preach.  It  was  no  easy  task  to 
find  a  safe  and  suitable  auditorium ;  but 
Lord  Paget,  one  of  their  own  number,  was 
daring  enough  to  hire  from  Lord  Norreys 
the  hall  of  a  great  house  in  the  neighbour- 
hood of  Smithfield.  All  the  servants  and 
porters  were  turned  out  for  the  occasion, 
and  gentlemen  took  their  places.  Within 
a  few  days,  however,  rumours  about  Cam- 
pion's sermon  and  about  Campion  were 
flying  over  the  city.  There  were  a  number 
of  spies  about,  instructed  by  the  Council, 
pretending  to  be  lapsed  Catholics  or  un- 
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SKIRMISHING 

settled  Protestants,  and  trying  hard  to  bag' 
such  new  and  shining  birds  as  the  Jesuits; 
but  Campion  had  a  friend  at  court  who 
warned  him,  and  therefore  held  only  private 
conferences  in  friendly  houses  with  those 
whom  he  knew.  The  missionaries  were 
sent  to  strengthen  the  wills  of  the  w^avering 
Catholics,  and  not  primarily  to  make  con- 
verts. Personal  dealings  with  would-be 
converts  were  never  attempted  except  as 
supplementary  to  the  action  of  the  lay 
helpers,  who  took  all  the  soundings,  and 
gave  any  needful  catechizing.  When  Par- 
sons, who  had  been  away  in  the  country, 
got  back  to  town,  Mr.  Henry  Orton  and 
Fr.  Robert  Johnson  had  been  tracked  and 
imprisoned,  through  Sledd,  the  apostate  in- 
former; and  it  became  plain  to  the  rest  of 
the  little  band  gathered  about  Parsons  and 
Campion  that,  for  reasons  immediate  and 
remote,  both  Fathers  must  be  spirited 
away.  Each  went  mounted,  with  a  com- 
panion, Gervase  Pierrepoint  being  Cam- 
pion's guide;  and  at  Hoxton,  in  July,  the 
priests  parted  for  their  separate  fields  of 
action. 

lOI 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

Just  before  that,  however,  there  arrived  as 
a  deputy  to  them,  Mr.  Thomas  Pounde  of 
Belmont,  the  best-known,  perhaps,  of  all 
English  prisoners  for  the  Faith  :  he  was 
committed  to  gaol  sixteen  times  and  passed 
thirty  years  in  durance.  Pounde  had 
managed  to  bribe  the  gaoler  of  the  Marshal- 
sea  to  let  him  out  for  this  short  journey. 
Most  anxious  for  the  good  repute  of  the 
Fathers,  he  rode  post-haste  to  tell  them  that 
enemies  in  London  were  spreading  the  re- 
port that  they  had  come  over  for  political 
purposes,  and  that  if  in  the  midst  of  their 
apostolic  work  in  the  shires  they  should  be 
taken  and  executed,  the  Government  would 
be  sure  to  issue  pamphlets,  as  was  its  habit, 
defaming  their  motives,  and  slandering  the 
Catholic  body.  Therefore  he  begged  both 
Jesuits  to  write  "  a  vindication  of  their  pre- 
sence and  purpose  in  England,"  which, 
signed  and  sealed,  might  be  given  to  the 
public,  if  things  came  to  the  worst.  The 
certain  accusation  and  its  answer  had  been 
debated  before,  in  council,  by  many  clergy, 
who  had  contented  themselves  with  agree- 
ing to  swear,  when  called  upon,  that  they 

102 


SKIRMISHING 

had  no  business  whatever  in  hand  but  that 
of   religion.     But   Campion    now   drew   up 
his    own    document    then    and    there    at    a 
table,  while  the  others  were  talking.     In  it, 
he  declares  that  "  my  charge  is  of  free  cost 
to    preach    the    Gospel  ...  to    cry    alarm 
spiritual ;"  that  "  matters  of  state  are  things 
which  appertain  not  to  my  vocation,"  and 
are  "  straitly  forbid  "  :  things  "  from  which 
I    do    gladly    estrange    and    sequester    my 
thoughts."     And   never   thinking   of   him- 
self, but  fired  with  confidence  in  his  cause, 
he  goes  on  to  beg  leave  for  a  public  pre- 
sentment of   the    Faith.     He   says,    in    the 
course  of  this  splendid  little  philippic :    "I 
should    be    loath    to   speak    anything    that 
might  sound  of  an  insolent  brag  or  chal- 
lenge ...  in    this    noble    realm,    my   dear 
country."    It  shows  completely  the  partisan 
temper  of  the  time  that  his  statement  got 
exactly  that  name,  and  no  other,  fastened 
upon  it.     It  was  called  everywhere  ''  Cam- 
pion's    Brag     and     Challenge,"     and     its 
modest  author  was  contemned  and  ridiculed 
for   the    implication    that    his    own    powers 
were    so    very    superior    that    he    must    of 
103 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

course    get    the    better    of    others    in    any 
argument ! 

Pounde  took  his  copy,  which  Campion 
forgot  to  seal,  back  to  London,  read  it  in 
raptures,  let  it  be  seen,  admired,  talked 
about,  and  transcribed  :  this  was  his  curious 
way  of  keeping  a  secret.  The  result  was 
that  what  was  meant  to  meet  a  particular 
crisis,  and  serve  for  a  last  will  and  testa- 
ment, became  as  common  property,  before- 
hand, as  any  ballad  sold  in  the  streets. 
Lively  measures  were  at  once  taken  by  the 
Bishop  of  Winchester;  and  the  State,  hypo- 
critically urging  "conspiracy,"  pounced 
upon  a  host  of  Catholic  lords  and  gentle- 
men. Yet  Campion's  little  composition, 
which  bred  all  this  fury,  only  asks  for 
**  three  sorts  of  indifferent  and  quiet 
audience  "  :  one  hearing  before  the  Lords 
in  Council,  on  the  relation  of  the  Church  to 
the  English  Government;  the  next  before 
the  Heads  of  Houses  of  both  Universities, 
on  the  proofs  of  the  truth  of  the  Catholic 
religion ;  the  last  before  the  courts  spiritual 
and  temporal,  "wherein  I  will  justify  the 
said  Faith  by  the  common  wisdom  of  the 
104 


SKIRMISHING 

laws  standing."  Then  he  pleads  in  defer- 
ent and  almost  affectionate  words,  for  a 
special  audience  of  '*  her  noble  Grace  "  the 
Queen.  In  his  candour  and  fearless  sim- 
plicity he  believed  that  opponents  had  only 
to  hear  to  be  convinced,  thus  crediting  them 
w^ith  that  earnestness  in  religious  matters 
which  he  possessed  himself,  and  which  only 
a  very  few  of  the  best  Protestants  of  that 
day  shared  with  him.  Campion  closes  his 
appeal  with  a  wonderfully  beautiful  refer- 
ence to  the  vowed  Seminarian  priests,  and 
in  a  lofty  music  of  good  English,  worthy 
to  stand  by  any  passage  of  like  length  in 
the  great  prose  classics.  '*  Hearken  to 
those  which  spend  the  best  blood  in  their 
bodies  for  your  salvation.  Many  innocent 
hands  are  lifted  up  unto  Heaven  for  you, 
daily  and  hourly,  by  those  English  stud- 
ents whose  posterity  shall  not  die,  which, 
beyond  the  seas,  gathering  virtue  and 
sufficient  knowledge  for  the  purpose,  are 
determined  never  to  give  you  over,  but 
either  to  win  you  to  Heaven  or  to  die  upon 
your  pikes.  And  touching  our  Society,  be 
it  known  unto  you  that  we  have  made  a 
105 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

league  (all  the  Jesuits  in  the  world,  whose 
succession  and  multitude  must  overreach 
all  the  practices  of  England  !)  cheerfully  to 
carry  the  cross  that  you  shall  lay  upon  us, 
and  never  to  despair  your  recovery  while 
we  have  a  man  left  to  enjoy  your  Tyburn, 
or  to  be  racked  with  your  torments,  or  to 
be  consumed  with  your  prisons.  The  ex- 
pense is  reckoned ;  the  enterprise  is  begun  ; 
it  is  of  God  :  it  cannot  be  withstood.  So 
the  Faith  was  planted.  So  it  must  be  re- 
stored. If  these  my  offers  be  refused,  and 
my  endeavours  can  take  no  place,  and  I, 
having  run  thousands  of  miles  to  do  you 
good,  shall  be  rewarded  with  rigour,  I  have 
no  more  to  say,  but  recommend  your  case 
and  mine  to  Almighty  God,  the  Searcher 
of  Hearts  :  Who  send  us  of  His  grace,  and 
set  us  at  accord  before  the  Day  of  Pay- 
ment, to  the  intent  we  may  at  last  be  friends 
in  Heaven,  where  all  injuries  shall  be  for- 
gotten." 

Parsons'  work  lay  in   Gloucester,   Here- 
ford,   Worcestershire,    Warwickshire    and 
Derbyshire;       Campion's      in      the      more 
southerly  Midlands.    The  wandering  Levite 
io6 


SKIRMISHING 

with  his  attendant  gentleman  would  ap- 
proach at  evening,  and  with  caution,  the 
friendly  roof,  either  Catholic  or,  though 
Protestant,  containing  Catholics,  and  be 
received  at  the  door  as  strangers,  then  con- 
ducted to  an  inner  room,  where  all  who 
seek  the  priest's  ministrations  kneel  and 
ask  for  his  blessing.  That  night  all  is  got 
ready,  and  confessions  are  heard,  instruc- 
tions given,  reconciliations  effected;  at 
dawn  there  is  !Mass,  preaching,  and  Holy 
Communion ;  and  the  travellers  depart  for 
the  next  household  station.  Most  edifying 
accounts  are  given  of  the  devotion  of  good 
married  Confessors,  who  were  scattered  all 
over  the  land.  The  Jesuits  met  with  many 
seculars,  "whom  we  find  in  every  place, 
whereby  both  the  people  is  well  served,  and 
we  much  eased  in  our  charge."  These 
were  the  old  Marian  priests,  active  in  ob- 
scurity. The  "harvest  is  wonderful  great "  : 
so  many  show  "  a  conscience  pure,  a 
courage  invincible,  zeal  incredible,  a  work 
so  worthy;  the  number  innumerable,  of 
high  degree,  of  mean  calling  ...  of  every 
age  and  sex."  "  The  solaces  that  are  ever 
107 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

intermingled  with  the  miseries  are  so  great 
that  they  do  not  only  countervail  the  fear 
of  what  punishment  temporal  soever,  but 
by  infinite  sweetness  make  all  worldly  pains, 
be  they  never  so  great,  seem  nothing,"  for 
the  sake  of  *'  this  good  people  which  had 
lived  before,  so  many  ages,  in  one  only 
Faith."  Day  by  day,  running  in  and  out 
of  all  the  busy  heroic  toil,  is  the  fiery  thread 
of  danger  and  alarm.  '*  We  are  sitting 
merrily  at  table,  conversing  familiarly  on 
matters  of  faith  and  devotion  (for  our  talk 
is  generally  of  such  things)  when  comes  a 
hurried  knock  at  the  door.  .  .  .  We  all 
start  up  and  listen,  like  deer  when  they 
hear  the  huntsman.  ...  If  it  is  nothing, 
we  laugh  at  our  fright."  Then  there  was 
calumny,  a  far  more  difficult  thing  to  accept 
in  the  same  gay  spirit.  "They  tear  and 
sting  us  with  their  venomous  tongues,  call- 
ing us  seditious,  hypocrites;  yea,  heretics, 
too !  which  is  much  laughed  at.  The 
people  hereupon  is  ours."  And  again: 
"  The  house  where  I  am  is  sad  :  no  other 
talk  but  of  the  death,  flight,  prison,  or 
spoil  of  their  friends;  nevertheless,  they 
1 08 


SKIRMISHING 

proceed  with  courage.  Very  many,  even  at 
this  present,  being  restored  to  the  Church, 
new  soldiers  give  in  their  names,  while  the 
old  offer  up  their  blood,  by  which  holy 
hosts  and  oblations  God  will  be  pleased. 
And  we  shall — no  question  ! — by  Him  over- 
come." These  are  extracts  from  Campion's 
letters,  and  give  a  clear  idea  of  his  life 
during  his  visitations  of  1580-1. 

There  were  then  many  more  Manor- 
houses,  kept  up  as  such,  than  there  are  now ; 
most  of  those  which  Campion  visited  had 
their  hiding-place  or  *'  priests'  hole,"  to 
which  he  could  always  fly  when  safety  de- 
manded it.  He  settled  a  host  of  weak 
Catholics  in  their  religion,  and  also  received 
a  great  many  conspicuous  converts.  It  will 
be  noted  that  the  little  Jesuit  mission  was 
directed  to  the  gentry.  This  was  not 
through  accident,  or  partiality,  or  snobbery. 
The  gentry  had  most  personal  w^eight ;  they 
were  better  able  to  protect  a  hunted  man ; 
and  they  were  naturally  supposed  to  have 
stricter  notions  of  honour :  this  last  was 
a  point  on  which  everything  depended. 
Moreover,  the  old  spirit  of  feudalism  was 
109 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

not  so  dead  but  that  through  them  all  work- 
men on  their  estates,  or  connected  by  inter- 
est with  them  in  the  towns,  could  be  reached 
and  influenced.  In  a  hurried  campaign, 
every  consideration  of  prudence  and  fore- 
thought would  choose  them,  so  to  speak, 
as  the  outworks  of  the  citadel. 

The  country  districts  north  and  south  were 
all  still  favourable  to  Catholicism.  London, 
the  University  of  Cambridge,  and  some 
larger  towns  and  seaports,  especially  in  the 
West,  were  half  Puritan  or  Calvinistic, 
half  irreligious  and  indifferent.  The  ancient 
Faith,  as  was  well  said  by  Sir  Cuthbert 
Sharpe,  for  the  most  part  "  still  lay  like 
lees  at  the  bottom  of  men's  hearts;  and  if 
the  vessel  were  ever  so  little  stirred,  came 
to  the  top."  A  thoughtful  living  writer 
sums  it  up  as  his  conclusion  that  England 
would  have  resumed  the  Faith  with  a  sigh 
of  relief,  had  it  not  been  for  the  resentments 
bred  by  the  Catholic  ''plotters."  Con- 
sidering the  frightful  circumstances  of  the 
body  to  which  these  men  belonged,  it  is 
putting  too  great  a  strain,  perhaps,  upon 
human  nature  to  expect  smooth  behaviour 
no 


SKIRMISHING 

from  every  individual  in  it.  The  genuine 
"  plotters  "  were  few.  Against  them  stands 
the  passionate  loyalty  of  our  persecuted 
minority,  both  all  along,  and  in  the  one 
great  crisis.  When  the  deliverer  loomed 
up  in  the  shape  of  Philip's  Armada,  blessed 
and  indulgenced  like  a  crusade  of  old,  where 
were  they,  supposed  to  be  so  sick  of  Queen 
and  country?  Hand  in  impoverished 
pocket,  strengthening  the  national  defences; 
cutlass  on  thigh,  manning  the  English  fleet. 


MANY   LABOURS  :    AND   A   BOOK  :     1580 

CAMPION  passed  four  months  of  plea- 
sant weather  in  hard  and  happy- 
work,  moving  about  Northampton- 
shire, Berkshire,  Oxfordshire.  Som.e  lovely 
little  spiritual  adventure  starred  his  path, 
and  the  paths  of  others,  wherever  he  went. 
He  must  have  seen  more  than  once,  from 
some  hilly  road  afar  off,  even  if  he  never 
entered  it, 

"The  towery  City,  branchy  between  towers," 

which  was  so  dear  to  him  to  the  last.  In 
October  of  this  year,  1580,  he  was  bidden 
towards  London  as  far  as  Uxbridge  :  farther 
he  could  hardly  come,  without  the  gravest 
peril,  as  the  Privy  Council  were  just  issu- 
ing their  third  warrant  for  the  capture  of 
Jesuits.  There  he  was  joined  by  Fr. 
Parsons  and  several  other  missionaries.  A 
112 


MANY    LABOURS 

conference  was  held :  it  was  represented 
that  Norfolk  and  Lancashire  were  eager 
to  claim  Fr.  Campion's  ministrations,  and 
it  was  decided  that  he  w^as  to  go  to  Lanca- 
shire, preferable  as  being  not  only  farther 
from  London  and  also  "  more  affected  to 
the  Catholic  religion,"  but  as  having  better 
private  libraries.  For  they  were  now  urg- 
ing Campion  to  write  again  :  this  time 
something  on  the  burning  questions  of  the 
day,  aimed  particularly  at  the  Universities 
(where  his  Challenge  was  still  the  staple  of 
daily  talk),  and  therefore  to  be  written  in 
Latin.  We  are  not  so  sure,  now-a-days, 
that  controversy  does  much  good,  but  one 
reason  for  that  may  be  that  we  have  few 
Campions  to  carry  it  on.  It  is  well  to  re- 
member that  people  then  read  nothing  else, 
except  poetry  !  Campion's  work  was  his 
famous  Decern  Rationes  Propositce  in 
Causa  Fideiy  or,  as  the  title  is  given  in  its 
only  modern  translation  (1827),  Ten  Reasons 
for  Renouncing  the  Protestantj  and  Em- 
bracing the  Catholic  Religion.  At  first 
the  author  was  for  calling  his  thesis  Heresy 
in  Despair:  De  Hcvresi  Desperata.  His 
113  I 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

counsellors  agreed,  amid  laughter,  that  it 
would  be  odd  indeed  to  nail  such  a  title  as 
that  to  the  mast,  when  heresy  was  so  power- 
ful and  flourishing ;  but,  according  to  Cam- 
pion's own  philosophy,  there  was  no  life 
in  an  argument  whose  only  premisses,  as  he 
once  said,  are  *' curses,  starvation,  and  the 
rack.'*  Here  we  come  back  at  once  to  his 
root  principle,  which  modern  research  so 
fully  justifies,  in  regard  to  the  England  of 
his  own  day.  A  "gentleman  saint"  who 
uttered  many  an  ironic,  but  never  a  con- 
temptuous word,  Campion  could  not  be 
persuaded  that  *'  the  received  religion  "  was 
a  genuine  thing.  He  believed  that  temporal 
interest  alone  led  people  to  conform  to  the 
new  alterations  and  restrictions ;  that  the 
lay  statesmen  who  were  pushing  things 
through  were  concerned  not  with  doctrine, 
but  only  with  negations  of  doctrine,  and 
that  on  the  other  side,  nothing  was  so  pro- 
mising, nothing  so  gloriously  fruitful,  as 
persecutions  and  martyrdoms.  First  and 
last,  he  had  a  strong  dash  of  optimism.  In 
this  spirit  he  began  his  last  treatise,  writing 
it  as  best  he  could,  depending  on  his 
114 


MANY    LABOURS 

memory,  and  on  such  books  as  country 
squires  might  have  in  their  houses,  and 
putting  it  together  in  among  the  almost 
incessant  journeys,  duties,  fatigues  and 
alarms  of  the  next  few  weeks.  ' 

The  two  Jesuit  friends  parted  at  Uxbridge, 
"with  the  tenderness  of  heart  which  in 
such  a  case  and  so  dangerous  a  time  may 
be  imagined."  Gervase  Pierrepoint  con- 
veyed Campion  into  Nottinghamshire  to 
spend  Christmas  at  Thoresby,  his  home ; 
thence  into  Derbyshire,  where  one  of  the 
young  Tempests  succeeded  as  guide;  and 
the  gentleman  who  directed  the  Yorkshire 
part  of  the  journey  reached  in  safety  the 
house  of  his  own  brother-in-law,  Mr. 
William  Harrington  of  Mount  St.  John, 
near  Thirsk,  where  the  Father  was  received 
with  open  arms.  Here  he  settled  down  for 
less  than  a  fortnight  at  his  desk,  among  his 
note-books,  at  peace.  But  to  have  him  in 
the  house  at  all  was  to  risk  the  contagion  of 
the  things  of  God.  The  eldest  of  the  large 
family,  a  wild  boy,  his  father's  namesake, 
was  quick  to  feel  the  spell  of  this  most 
attractive  guest.  "  Not  only  his  eloquence 
115 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

and  fire,"  says  Fr.  Henry  More  of  Cam- 
pion, "  but  a  certain  hidden  infused  power, 
made  his  words  strike  home."  Some  of 
these  simple  words  of  every  day  "struck 
home  "  to  the  young  William  Harrington, 
so  that  fourteen  years  afterwards  he  found 
the  palm-branch  of  martyrdom  growing 
green  and  fair  for  him  on  the  public  execu- 
tion ground.  At  this  very  time  of  Cam- 
pion's visit,  the  Lent  of  1581,  there  was 
another  lad  of  fourteen  or  fifteen,  John 
Pibush,  running  about  the  streets  of  Thirsk, 
his  native  village,  who  may  have  gone  to 
Confession  to  the  strange  priest  at  the 
Manor,  and  wondered  at  him,  unknowing 
that  he,  too,  was  sealed  as  a  future  holocaust 
in  the  same  immortal  cause. 

From  Mount  St.  John,  where  he  must 
have  tasted  much  natural  happiness.  Cam- 
pion travelled  into  Lancashire,  under  the 
protection  of  a  former  pupil  and  his  wife. 
There  he  was  affectionately  welcomed  and 
cared  for  in  each  of  eight  great  houses, 
where  himself  and  his  spiritual  conferences 
were  still  a  glowing  tradition,  sixty  or 
seventy  years  afterwards.  He  had  to  live, 
116 


MANY    LABOURS 

think,  write,  in  a  crowd.  The  local  gentry- 
drove  from  great  distances  and  slept  in 
barns,  only  to  hear  and  see  him  once.  At 
Blainscough  Hall,  the  seat  of  the  Worth- 
ingtons,  the  pursuivants  would  have  dis- 
covered him,  where  he  was  walking  in  the 
open  air,  had  it  not  been  for  the  cleverness 
and  splendid  presence  of  mind  of  a  faithful 
maidservant,  standing  hard  by.  She  ran 
up  against  him,  in  a  pretended  fit  of  temper, 
and  shoved  him  into  a  shallow  pond  !  The 
pursuivants,  sent  out  by  the  terrible  Hunt- 
ingdon, President  of  the  North,  to  appre- 
hend a  distinguished  cleric  and  scholar, 
naturally  never  gave  that  mud-covered 
yokel  a  second  glance. 

Fr.  Campion  would  have  learned  by  now 
the  fate  of  most  of  the  enthusiastic  band  who 
had  travelled  in  his  company,  from  Rome  or 
Rheims  to  England,  during  the  preceding 
summer :  five  priests,  including  the  lovable 
gay-hearted  Sherwin,  were  languishing  in 
cells  and  on  the  rack ;  Fr.  Parsons,  though 
hunted,  was  free.  Following  a  suggestion 
of  Campion's,  he  set  up  a  private  printing 
press,  in  order  that  the  Teji  Reasons  and 
117 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

other  Catholic  works  of  defensive  contro- 
versy might  be  issued  as  they  were  needed. 
Publishing,  like  every  other  major  industry 
open  to  the  Catholics,  was  outlawed;    de- 
votional   and    doctrinal    books    had    to    be 
brought  out  in  this  hole-and-corner  fashion, 
if  at  all.     Another  of  those  lay  associates 
of  the   mission,   whose   devotion   and   use- 
fulness  had   been    proved   at   every    point, 
came  forward  to  bear  the  brunt  of  the  new 
enterprise.     The  young  Stephen  Brinkley, 
Bachelor  of  Civil  Law,  called  by  Parsons 
"a  gentleman  of  high  attainments  both  in 
literature  and  in  virtue,"  volunteered  to  be- 
come  manager  and  head  compositor,   and 
amid  many  dramatic  and  exciting  interrup- 
tions, carried  his  task  through.    Machinery, 
types,  paper,  and  the  rest  w^ere  bought  with 
money  supplied  by  the  ever-helpful  George 
Gilbert.     Brinkley    himself,    to    avert    sus- 
picion, had  to  buy  horses  for  his  workmen, 
and    attire    them    like    persons    of    quality 
whenever    they    went    abroad.      He    quite 
knew    what    he    was    risking.     After   him, 
still  another  knight  of  letters  in  a  far  less 
perilous  field,  offered  himself  in  the  person 
ii8 


MANY    LABOURS 

of  Thomas  Fitzherbert  of  Swynnerton,  then 
newly  married  (long  afterwards  a  priest, 
and  Rector  of  the  English  College  in 
Rome).  His  not  undelightful  duty  was  to 
verify  the  mass  of  references  and  authorities 
quoted  in  the  margins  of  Campion's  manu- 
script :  this  he  did  in  a  scholarly  way,  satis- 
factory to  the  scholarly  author,  who  be- 
lieved in  research,  and  liked  nothing  at 
second-hand.  Lastly,  Parsons,  as  Cam- 
pion's Superior,  recalled  him  to  London  in 
April  or  May  to  see  the  little  volume 
through  the  press,  and  cautioned  him  to 
put  up  only  at  inns  on  the  way,  where 
happily  he  might  pass  as  "  the  gentleman 
in  the  parlour." 

Thirty  miles  or  so  north  of  the  great 
city.  Campion  had  one  of  his  ever-recurring 
narrow  escapes.  A  spy,  hungry  for  reward, 
had  dogged  his  steps  on  his  way  from 
York.  At  a  certain  town  not  named,  a 
little  boy  who  knew  Campion  by  sight 
overheard  this  man  describing  the  Father 
to  a  magistrate,  and  calling  him  **  Jesuit,'' 
a  word  the  child  had  never  heard.  He  ran 
straight  to  the  tavern  where  the  "Jesuit" 
119 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

had  put  up  and  succeeded  in  finding  him 
and  warning  him  !  so  the  bird  was  safely 
on  the  wing  before  the  fowlers  were  in 
sight. 

Campion  came  to  Westminster  and 
Whitefriars,  and  set  to  work,  diligently  as 
ever.  With  Father  Robert  he  had  frequent 
occasion  to  visit  the  Bellamys  of  Uxenden 
Hall  near  Harrow,  a  family  under  whose 
roof  his  old  friend  Richard  Bristow  had 
died  in  the  preceding  autumn.  Their  later 
adversities  and  annihilation  were  only  too 
typical  of  Catholic  domestic  history  under 
Elizabeth.  Going  to  Harrow  meant  going 
up  the  Edgware  Road,  and  in  the  mouth 
of  that  road,  between  waste  lands  (facing 
the  spot  across  the  street  where  the  Marble 
Arch  now  stands),  was  the  famous  Tyburn 
gallows.  This  particular  one  had  been  put 
up  new  for  Dr.  Storey's  execution,  ten 
years  before  :  it  had  three  posts  set  in  a 
triangle,  with  connecting  cross-bars  at  the 
top.  Once  every  week,  w^ithout  intermis- 
sion, batches  of  criminals  perished  there. 
Even  now,  and  with  far  greater  frequency 
afterwards,    holy    and    innocent    men    and 

120 


MANY    LABOURS 

women  made  up  a  large  proportion  of  the 
"  criminals  "  ;  and  remembering  these  dear 
souls,  and  conscious  that  there  he  was  to 
follow  them  in  confession  of  the  King  of 
Martyrs,  Campion  would  always  solemnly 
take  off  his  hat  and  pause,  in  passing,  to 
salute  Tyburn  Tree. 

Meanwhile,  in  the  quiet  and  seclusion  of 
Dame  Cecily  Stonor's  park,  near  Henley, 
and  in  the  attics  which  she  bravely  set 
apart  for  the  purpose,  the  Decern  Rationes 
got  itself  safely  printed  by  Stephen  Brink- 
ley  and  his  seven  honest  men.  Campion, 
with  fine  bravado,  dated  it  from  '*  Cosmo- 
polis  " ;  and  the  distribution  of  it  was  as 
audacious  as  the  dating.  The  first  copies 
bound,  about  four  hundred  in  number,  were 
hurriedly  stabbed,  instead  of  stitched,  in 
time  to  go  up  for  the  Oxford  commemora- 
tion, June  27th  of  that  year.  The  church  of 
St.  Mary-the-Virgin  was  then  used  for  all 
the  "  Acts,"  for  the  accommodation  of 
which,  a  century  later,  the  Sheldonian 
Theatre  was  built.  When  the  company 
entered  St.  Mary's,  the  benches  were  found 
littered  with  the  "  seditious  "  books.  Their 
121 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

dedication  was  "  to  the  studious  Collegians 
flourishing  at  Oxford  and  Cambridge,"  and 
the  youths  in  question  were  just  in  the 
humour  to  read  them;  and  read  them  they 
did,  then  and  there,  instead  of  attending  to 
the  important  annual  function  going  on  ! 
This  rudeness  bred  protest,  and  protest 
bred  a  lively  scene.  To  understand  it  we 
must  recall  that  the  undergraduate  element 
was  then,  by  comparison,  the  conservative 
element.  Heads  of  Houses,  Fellows  and 
Tutors,  learned  and  popular  men,  had  been 
removed  wholesale  by  the  Elizabethan 
settlement  of  religion  in  favour  of  new  men 
concisely  described  as  ''extremists  from 
Geneva,  intellectually  inferior  to  those  who 
had  been  displaced,  and  representing  a 
different  spirit,  and  different  traditions." 
The  student  body  looked  on  them  with 
scorn.  Again,  to  quote  another  chief 
authority  on  this  subject,  ''the  young 
Oxonians  did  not  bear  easily  the  Eliza- 
bethan drill,  and  felt  that  if  their  liberty 
must  be  crushed  they  would  fain  have  it 
crushed  by  something  more  venerable  than 
the  mushroom  authority  of  the  Ministers  of 

122 


MANY    LABOURS 

the  Queen.  They  were  as  tinder,  and  Cam- 
pion's book  was  just  the  sort  of  spark  to  set 
them  in  a  blaze."  The  excited  Govern- 
ment told  off  relays  of  clergymen  to  court- 
martial  and  shoot  it.  Aylmer,  Bishop  of 
London,  wished  to  commission  nine  Deans, 
seven  Archdeacons,  and  the  two  Regius 
Professors  of  Divinity  to  punish  the  tiny 
offender ;  but  the  actual  ammunition  brought 
into  the  field  was  not  quite  so  imposing  as 
all  this.  The  answers  were  duly  published, 
dealing  in  the  most  unmeasured  personal 
abuse  of  Campion.  No  attempt  was  made 
in  any  instance  to  rival  either  his  religious 
fervour  or  his  literary  grace.  His  last 
labour  with  his  pen  made,  in  short,  a  very 
great  and  an  extremely  prolonged  stir. 
Its  fate  was  a  romantic  one  from  start  to 
finish,  for  it  was  so  quickly  and  thoroughly 
confiscated  that  not  more  than  a  couple  of 
copies  are  now  known  to  exist.  Despite  the 
outcry,  or  because  of  it,  edition  after  edition 
was  called  for.  There  have  been  nearly 
thirty  reprints  in  the  original  Latin,  and 
many  translations  into  modern  languages, 
inclusive  of  three  beautiful  translations  into 
123 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

the  good  English  common  in  1606,  1632, 
and  1687,  one  of  which  should  be  re-issued. 
The  Ten  Reasons,  written  under  such  im- 
mense difficulties,  had  all  of  Campion's 
zeal  and  pith,  and  was  "a  model  of  elo- 
quence, elegance,  and  good  taste."  Marc 
Antony  Muret,  the  greatest  Latinist  of  the 
time,  called  it  libellum  aureum,  "a  golden 
little  book,  writ  by  the  very  finger  of  God." 
Campion  had  gone,  in  his  ardent,  sensitive, 
rhetorical,  compendious  way,  over  the  whole 
ground  of  the  credentials  of  that  Church 
which  had  had  the  allegiance  of  England  for 
more  than  a  thousand  years  :  Scripture,  the 
Fathers,  the  Councils,  the  evidence  of 
human  history,  are  all  drawn  upon,  in  the 
best  spirit  of  the  new  learning.  The 
characteristic  note  of  personal  appeal  to  the 
Queen  is  not  lacking  here  at  the  end. 
Campion's  theme  is  the  Church,  and  he 
quotes  from  the  Prophet  Isaiah  :  "  Kings 
shall  be  thy  nursing  fathers,  and  Queens  thy 
nursing  mothers;"  and  he  names  as  among 
the  great  monarchs  whose  joy  it  was  to 
further  the  Church  in  their  day,  St.  Ed- 
ward the  Confessor,  St.  Louis  of  France, 
124 


MANY    LABOURS 

St.  Henry  of  Saxony,  St.  Wenceslaus  of 
Bohemia,  St.  Stephen  of  Hungary,  and  the 
rest.  Then  he  cries  out  to  *'  Elizabeth, 
most  mighty  Queen,"  to  listen.  "  For  this 
Prophet  is  speaking  unto  thee,  is  teaching 
thee  thy  duty.  I  tell  thee  one  Heaven  can- 
not gather  in  Calvin  and  these  thine  an- 
cestors. Join  thyself  therefore  to  them, 
else  shalt  thou  stand  unworthy  of  that  name 
of  thine,  thy  genius,  thy  learning,  thy 
fame  before  all  men,  and  thy  fortunes.  To 
this  end  do  I  conspire,  and  will  conspire, 
against  thee,  whatever  betideth  me,  who  am 
so  often  menaced  with  the  gallows  as  a  con- 
spirator hostile  to  thy  life.  ('  All  hail,  thou 
good  Cross!')  The  day  shall  come,  O 
Elizabeth  !  the  day  that  shall  make  it  alto- 
gether clear  which  of  the  two  did  love  thee 
best ;  the  Company  of  Jesus,  or  the  brood 
of  Luther!" 

Hardly  was  the  last  of  the  original  im- 
prints bound  and  distributed,  when  the  pur- 
suivants in  search  of  what  was  roughly,  but 
significantly  enough,  called  "  Massing- 
stufT,"  pounced  upon  Stonor  Park,  and 
caught  red-handed  there,  and  carried  off, 
125 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

the  two  gentlemen,  John  Stonor  and 
Stephen  Brinkley,  and  four  of  the  printers, 
one  of  whom,  a  poor  frightened  fellow, 
conformed,  and  was  let  off  at  once, 
William  Hartley,  ordained  the  year  before, 
who  had  in  person  strewn  the  Ten  Reasons 
over  the  benches  of  the  University  Church, 
and  made  special  gifts  of  copies  in  various 
Colleges,  was  arrested  a  little  later.  His 
fate  was  not  exceptional,  like  that  of  his 
comrades  just  mentioned,  who  were  event- 
ually released  on  bail.  He  suffered  at 
Tyburn ;  and  his  mother,  heroic  as  the 
mother  of  the  Macchabees,  stood  by  his 
young  body  in  its  butchering,  and  thanked 
God  aloud  for  her  privilege  in  so  giving 
back  to  Him  such  a  son. 

Campion  spent  St.  John's  Day  (marking 
the  first  anniversary  of  his  return  to  Eng- 
land) at  Lady  Babington's,  at  Twyford  in 
Buckinghamshire,  a  house  not  many  miles 
from  Stonor,  on  the  other  bank  of  the 
Thames.  He  stayed  a  little  while  at  Bled- 
low  also,  and  at  Wynge,  with  the  Dormers, 
his  whole  heart  bent,  every  moment  of  the 
time,  upon  his  Father's  business.  But  his 
free  days  were  almost  done. 
126 


MANY    LABOURS 

The  outcry  redoubled,  now  that  he  had 
again  succeeded  in  catching  pubHc  atten- 
tion. Fresh  and  monstrously  cruel  measures 
were  therefore  taken  against  all  Papists. 
"  Naught  is  lacking,"  wrote  to  Acquaviva 
the  tender  soul  who  too  well  knew  himself 
to  be  the  cause  of  many  sorrows,  "  but  that 
to  our  books  written  with  ink  should  suc- 
ceed others  daily  published,  and  written  in 
blood."  Fr.  Parsons  prudently  ordered 
him  back  to  the  North.  The  two  heard 
each  other's  confessions  and  renewal  of 
vows  at  Stonor,  and  said  good-bye,  ex- 
changing hats  as  a  parting  gift,  after  the 
friendly  fashion  of  their  time.  Campion 
was  to  ride  straightway  into  Lancashire  to 
get  fiis  manuscript  and  notes,  left  behind^ 
his  former  companion  Ralph  Emerson  go- 
ing with  him ;  and  he  was  then  to  betake 
himself  to  the  fresh  mission  field  in  Nor- 
folk. As  it  fell  out,  he  soon  spurred  back 
after  Parsons  to  tell  him  of  a  letter  that 
moment  received.  It  was  from  a  gentle- 
man named  Yate,  then  a  prisoner  for  his 
religion,  earnestly  begging  Campion  to 
visit  Lyford  Grange  in  Berkshire,  the 
gentleman's  own  estate,  hard  by,  where  his 
127 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

wife  and  mother  still  were,  together  with 
Edward  Yate,  and  part  of  a  proscribed  com- 
munity of  English  Brigittine  nuns,  driven 
back  into  England  by  troubles  in  the  Low 
Countries.  Fr.  Parsons,  knowing  the  house 
to  be  a  conspicuous  one,  and  already  sup- 
plied with  chaplains,  was  unwilling  to 
grant  the  permission.  But  eventually  he 
gave  in,  warning  the  two  others  not  to 
tarry  beyond  one  night  or  one  day,  and  as 
a  precaution,  putting  Campion  under  the 
lay  brother's  care  and  obedience.  Parsons 
parted  from  him  not  without  a  rueful  and 
affectionate  word.  ''You  are  too  easy- 
going by  far,"  he  said  to  his  friend  and 
fellow-soldier,  purposely  giving  its  least 
heroic  name  to  that  intentionally  prodigal 
zeal  for  souls.  "  I  know  you,  Father  Ed- 
mund; if  they  once  get  you  there,  you  will 
never  break  away  !" 


128 


"  We   have   not   broken   through   here  ! 


XI 

AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER:  1581 

ON  the  morning  of  July  12,  Father 
Edmund  and  Brother  Ralph,  faith- 
ful to  agreement,  were  in  their 
saddles  again,  leaving  the  pious  household 
refreshed,  but  lamenting.  Of  the  two  priests 
who  formed  part  of  it,  one,  Fr.  Collington, 
or  Colleton,  escorted  them  some  distance  on 
their  way.  Campion  had  already  been  way- 
laid, at  an  inn  near  Oxford,  by  many  friendly 
tutors  and  undergraduates,  when  up  gal- 
loped the  other  chaplain  of  Lyford,  Fr. 
Forde.  He  was  a  Trinity  College  man,  who 
had  entered  Douay  just  after  Campion's 
arrival  there,  and  was  to  follow  him  closely 
to  martyrdom.  Forde  brought  news  that  a 
large  party  of  Catholics  had  come  over  to 
Lyford  to  visit  the  nuns,  and,  distressed  at 
missing  Fr.  Campion,  were  clamouring  for 
his  return.  The  Oxford  group  had  been 
129  K 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

begging  their  old  champion  to  preach  to 
them,  which  he  would  not  do  in  so  public  a 
place ;  they  now  added  their  entreaties  to  those 
of  the  deputy  of  the  strangers,  and  offered  to 
join  these  at  Lyford.  Surely,  he  who  had 
given  a  whole  day  to  a  few  godly  nuns,  who 
needed  him  but  little,  could  not  refuse  a 
Saturday  and  Sunday  to  so  many  soiled 
souls  of  every  stripe  and  colour,  '*  thirsting 
for  the  waters  of  life  '*?  The  suit  was  in- 
sistent; Campion  was  inclined  to  give  in, 
but  referred  his  admirers  to  Brother  Emer- 
son, as  his  provisional  Superior.  He,  in 
turn,  was  overborne.  It  seemed  much  safer, 
after  all,  for  the  precious  Father  to  be 
among  friends,  while  he,  Ralph,  went  on 
alone  to  fetch  the  books  from  Mr.  Richard 
Houghton's  in  Lancashire.  So  back  to 
Lyford  Campion  went,  to  the  poor  little 
lay  brother's  everlasting  regret. 

On  the  following  Sunday  morning,  the 
ninth  after  Pentecost,  Campion  preached  at 
the  Grange  on  the  gospel  of  the  day,  the 
peculiarly  touching  gospel  of  Jesus  weeping 
over  Jerusalem,  the  changed  and  faithless 
city  which  stoned  the  prophets,  and  knew 
i".o 


AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER 

not,  in  her  day,  the  things  that  were  to  her 
peace.  No  one  present  ever  forgot  that 
heart-shaking  sermon,  laden  as  it  was  with 
pathos  and  presentiment.  There  was  an 
audience  of  sixty,  including  the  Oxonians. 
Unfortunately  it  included  also  George 
Eliot,  a  man  of  the  most  evil  personal  re- 
pute, an  apostate  and  a  Government  spy, 
armed  with  plenary  powers.  He  was  then 
under  a  charge  of  murder,  and  was  anxious 
to  whitewash  himself  in  the  eyes  of  the 
Council  by  some  conspicuous  public  service. 
He  had  once  been  a  servant  of  the  Ropers  at 
Canterbury;  and  Mrs.  Yate's  honest  cook, 
who  had  known  Eliot  there  in  his  decent 
days,  let  him  in  without  question,  whisper- 
ing what  a  treat  was  in  store  for  him  in  the 
preaching  of  none  other  than  Father  Cam- 
pion !  Though  the  warrant  for  the  appre- 
hension of  the  Jesuit  was  in  Eliot*s  pocket, 
he  little  thought  to  capture  him  so  easily 
and  so  soon.  A  pursuivant  had  accom- 
panied him  to  the  gate ;  Eliot  went  back  to 
this  person,  nominally  to  dismiss  him,  as  a 
heretic,  really  to  speed  him  to  a  magistrate 
at  Abingdon  for  a  force  of  an  hundred  men 
131 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to  arrest  Campion  in  the  Queen's  name. 
Then  he  went  piously  up-stairs  to  Mass, 
Edmund  Campion's  last  Mass,  so  far  as  we 
know.  That,  and  the  sermon,  passed  by  in 
peace,  and  Eliot  himself  left.  Immedi- 
ately after  dinner  an  alarm  was  given  by  a 
watchman  posted  in  a  turret,  who  saw  the 
enemy  far  off.  Campion  sprang  up,  and 
started  to  leave  at  once,  and  alone,  saying 
that  his  chances  of  escape  might  be  fair,  and 
that  his  remaining  would  only  involve  the 
household  in  discomfort  and  danger.  But 
they  all  clung  to  him,  assuring  him  that 
Lyford  was  full  of  cunning  secret  passages 
and  hiding-holes;  and  into  one  of  these,  in 
the  wall  above  the  gateway,  he  was  forth- 
with hurried  by  Forde  and  Collington,  who 
laid  themselves  down  by  his  side,  and 
crossed  their  hands  over  their  breasts. 

Back  came  Eliot  with  the  magistrate,  a 
civil  squire,  and  the  neighbourly  Berkshire 
yeomen  who  loathed  the  work.  He  made 
them  turn  the  whole  house  topsy-turvy,  nor 
desist  till  evenfall;  then,  finding  nothing, 
they  withdrew.  However,  they  returned 
almost  in  the  same  breath,  egged  on  by 
132 


AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER 

Eliot,  who  now  would  have  the  walls 
sounded.  The  Abingdon  magistrate  apolo- 
gized to  Mrs.  Yate,  not  for  the  Queen's 
warrant,  but  for  his  associate,  "  the  mad- 
man," as  he  called  him,  who  was  carry- 
ing it  out.  The  lady  was  an  invalid  ;  think- 
ing not  altogether  of  herself,  she  railed  and 
wept.  The  magistrate  kindly  soothed  her 
fears,  and  allowed  her  to  sleep  where  she 
pleased,  undisturbed  by  his  men  and  their 
din.  She  chose  to  have  a  bed  made  up 
close  to  the  hiding-place.  She  was  con- 
ducted thither  with  the  honours  of  war, 
and  a  sentinel  was  posted  at  the  room  door. 
The  tapping  and  smashing  went  merrily  on 
elsewhere  until  late  at  night,  when,  by  her 
orders,  the  sheriff's  baffled  underlings  made 
a  fine  supper,  and  being  worn  out,  fell  asleep 
over  their  cups,  even  as  they  were  expected 
to  do.  Poor  Mrs.  Yate  was  either  by  nature 
the  silliest  of  women,  or  else  her  nerves  were 
upset  by  illness  and  trying  circumstance, 
for  she  sent  for  Fr.  Campion,  as  well  as  for 
all  her  other  guests  who  were  in  that  part  of 
the  house,  and  requested  him,  as  he  stood 
by  her  bedside — of  all  possible  things — to 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

preach  to  them  just  once  more  !  One  could 
not  in  courtesy  refuse  a  hostess,  however 
unreasonable,  who  was  risking  so  much  for 
him ;  nor  would  it  have  been  like  him  to 
refuse.  Allen  tells  us  that  it  was  his  invari- 
able habit  to  preach  *' once  a  day  at  the 
least,  often  twice,  and  sometimes  thrice, 
whereby  through  God's  goodness  he  con- 
verted sundry  in  most  shires  of  this  realm 
of  most  wisdom  and  worship,  besides  young 
gentlemen  students,  and  others  of  all  sorts.'* 
Fr.  Campion  discharged  his  task.  As  the 
little  congregation  broke  up,  some  one 
stumbled  in  the  dark,  and  several  fell;  the 
snoring  sentinel  awoke;  searchers,  with 
lanterns  and  axes,  swarmed  up  from  below. 
There  was  nothing  to  be  seen  :  Lyford  was 
not  honeycombed  in  vain  with  hidden  pas- 
sages. The  men-at-arms  had  been  fooled  too 
often,  and  were  angry  with  Eliot.  Yet  that 
functionary  knew  that  something  was  still 
really  afoot,  that  the  alarm  was  not  a  false  one. 
On  going  down  the  stairs  again  he  struck  his 
hand  upon  the  wall  over  it.  "  We  have  not 
broken  through  here!"  he  said.  A  loyal 
servant  of  the  Yates,  who  was  at  his  side, 
134 


AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER 

and  who  knew  it  was  just  there  the  refugees 
lay,  muttered  that  enough  wall  had  been 
ruined  already,  and  then  went  deadly  pale 
while  Eliot's  eye  was  still  on  him.  The 
latter  called,  in  triumph,  for  a  smith's 
hammer,  and  banged  it  into  the  thin  timber 
partition,  and  into  the  narrow  cell.  And 
thus  was  Father  Edmund  Campion  taken  at 
Lyford  Grange,  at  dawn  of  Monday,  July 
17th,  in  the  year  1581. 

He  was  quite  calm,  quite  cheerful.  With 
him  were  apprehended  the  two  priests,  seven 
gentlemen,  and  two  yeomen.  Forster,  the 
Sheriff  of  Berkshire,  hitherto  absent, 
arrived.  As  he  was  an  Oxonian,  and  almost 
a  Catholic,  and  kindly  disposed  towards 
Campion,  he  waited  to  hear  from  the 
Council  what  was  to  be  done.  On  the  fourth 
day  orders  came  to  send  the  chief  prisoners 
up  to  London,  under  a  strong  guard.  Leav- 
ing the  old  moated  house  and  its  many  occu- 
pants, now  distracted  with  grief,  Campion 
took  horse  at  the  door,  and  rode  slowly  off, 
Eliot  prancing  in  triumph  at  the  head  of 
the  company,  though  the  common  people 
saluted  him  as  "  Judas,"  all  along  the  way. 
135 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

The  first  halt  was  at  Abingdon ;  sympathetic 
Oxford  scholars  had  come  down  to  see  the 
last  of  the  great  light  of  the  University 
under  such  black  eclipse.  Eliot  accosted  his 
victim  at  table:  "Mr.  Campion,  I  know 
well  you  are  wroth  with  me  for  this  work  !" 
He  drew  out  a  beautiful  answer,  sincere, 
composed,  half-playful :  a  saint's  answer. 
**  Nay,  I  forgive  thee;  and  in  token  thereof, 
I  drink  to  thee.  Yea,  and  if  thou  wilt  repent, 
and  come  to  Confession,  I  will  absolve  thee  : 
but  large  penance  thou  must  have!"  At 
Henley,  Campion  saw  in  the  crowd  Fr. 
Parsons'  servant,  and  greeted  him  as  he 
could,  without  betraying  him  :  Fr.  Parsons 
was  near  at  hand,  but  was  wisely  kept  in- 
doors. A  young  priest,  '*  Mr.  Filby  the 
younger,"  as  he  was  called,  a  native  of 
Oxford,  is  said  to  have  here  attempted  to 
speak  to  Campion ;  he  was  at  once  seized 
upon  as  a  traitorous  **  comforter  of  Jesu- 
its," and  added  to  the  cavalcade.  At  Cole- 
brook,  less  than  a  dozen  miles  from  London, 
came  fresh  instructions  from  the  Council. 
Sheriff  Forster  had  treated  his  prisoners 
most  honourably  :  they  were  now  to  be  made 
136 


AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER 

a  public  show.  Their  elbows  were  tied  from 
behind,  their  wrists  roped  together  in  front, 
and  their  feet  fastened  under  the  horses; 
their  leader  was  decorated  with  a  paper 
pinned  to  his  hat — Fr.  Parsons'  hat  of  late 
— on  which  in  large  lettering  was  inscribed  : 
"Campion,  the  Seditious  Jesuit."  And  in 
this  guise  he  was  paraded  through  the  chief 
streets  of  the  great  city  on  market-day.  The 
mob  roared  with  delight;  "but  the  wiser 
sort,"  says  Holinshed,  "  lamented  to  see  the 
land  fallen  to  such  barbarism  as  to  abuse  in 
this  manner  a  gentleman  famous  through- 
out Europe  for  his  scholarship  and  his 
innocency  of  life,  and  this  before  any  trial, 
or  any  proof  against  him,  his  case  being 
prejudged,  and  he  punished  as  if  already 
condemned."  Stephen  Brinkley  somehow 
obtained,  as  a  souvenir  of  a  fellow-prisoner, 
that  thick  dark  felt  hat,  which  had  been 
so  ignominiously  labelled  in  the  cause  of 
Christ.  Years  afterwards,  when  in  Belgium, 
he  put  it  into  a  reliquary,  "  out  of  love  and 
veneration  towards  that  most  holy  martyr  of 
God,  his  father  and  patron."  A  piece  of  it 
is  at  Roehampton,  in  the  Jesuit  Noviciate. 
137 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

On  reaching  the  Tower  the  Lyford  cap- 
tives were  given  up  to  the  Governor,  Sir 
Owen  Hopton.  Taking  his  cue,  he  had 
Campion  thrust  at  once  into  Little  Ease,  the 
famous  Tower  hole  not  high  enough  for  a 
man  to  stand  upright  in,  nor  long  enough 
for  him  to  lie  down  in.  After  four  days  of 
this  misery  he  was  suddenly  taken  out,  put 
in  a  boat  at  the  Traitors'  Gate  steps,  and 
rowed  to  the  town  house  of  the  Earl  of  Leices- 
ter. This  nobleman  and  Edmund  Campion, 
who  had  seen  so  much  of  each  other  for 
several  years,  had  been  placed  by  events  in 
silent  conflict.  There  stood  the  Earl  of  Bed- 
ford, with  two  Secretaries  of  State;  there 
stood  Campion's  host,  who,  for  one  reason  or 
another,  had  never  hounded  Catholics  with 
the  fixed  furyof  Walsinghamand  Burghley, 
and  thereby  did  not  displease  his  irresolute 
royal  mistress;  there  (a  theatrical  circum- 
stance !)  was  that  royal  mistress  herself,  a 
gleaming  stately  vision  in  a  great  chair, 
head  and  front  of  a  not  unfriendly  little  in- 
quisition. To  the  questions  heaped  upon 
him  Campion  gave  frank  answers.  On  the 
matter  of  "  allegiance  "  he  seemed  to  satisfy 

138 


i 


AT  LYFORD  GRANGE,  AND  AFTER 


the  company,  who  told  him  there  was  no 
fault  in  him  save  that  he  w^as  a  Papist. 
"  That,"  he  modestly  interrupted,  '*  is  my 
greatest  glory."  The  Queen  smiled  upon 
him,  and  offered  him  liberty  and  honours, 
but  under  conditions  which  his  conscience 
forbade  him  to  accept. 

AVhen  he  was  courteously  dismissed, 
Leicester,  probably  w'ith  a  kind  motive,  sent 
a  message  to  Hopton  to  keep  up  the  flatteries 
of  the  new  policy.  Hopton  put  on  an  almost 
affectionate  consideration  for  his  important 
prisoner ;  and  so  fast  as  he  was  prompted, 
by  artful  degrees,  he  suggested  to  him  a 
pension,  a  high  place  at  Court,  and  even  the 
promise  eventually  of  the  mitre  and  revenues 
of  the  primatial  See  of  Canterbury  !  Well 
did  the  Council  know,  all  along,  the  value 
of  these  stubborn  and  unpurchasable  con- 
fessors of  Christ.  To  cap  the  matter,  in 
Campion's  case,  it  was  publicly  announced, 
both  by  Hopton  and  by  Walsingham  (who 
knew^  the  untruth  of  their  announcement), 
that  the  Jesuit  was  at  the  point  of  recanta- 
tion and  Protestant  orthodoxy,  and  in  full 
sight  of  the  future  Archbishopric,  "to  the 
139 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

great  content  of  the  Queen."  It  flew  all  over 
London  that  he  would  presently  preach  at 
Paul's  Cross,  and  there  burn  the  Decern 
Rationes  with  his  own  hand.  Eventually 
Hopton  returned  to  first  principles  indoors, 
and  inquired  point-blank  of  Campion 
whether  he  would  give  up  his  religion,  and 
conform.  The  reply  is  easily  imagined.  A 
continued  course  of  wheedling  was  wasteful 
business.  So  thought  the  Council ;  and  three 
days  after  his  strange  and  sudden  sight  of 
the  Queen's  Grace  at  Leicester  House, 
Edmund  Campion,  first  kneeling  down  at 
the  door  and  invoking  the  Holy  Name  for 
steadying  of  his  manhood,  was  stripped  and 
fastened  to  the  rollers  of  the  Tower  rack. 
Blandishments  had  failed  to  move  him ;  they 
would  try  mortal  pain,  and  see  what  that 
could  do.  Torture,  nevertheless,  was  as 
much  against  the  laws  of  England  then 
(though  not  against  the  laws  of  some  less 
humane  countries),  as  it  is  now. 


140 


XII 

THE   THICK    OF    THE    FRAY  :     1 58 1 

CAMPION,  in  between  the  working 
of  the  rollers,  was  asked  his  opinion 
of  certain  political  utterances  in  the 
works  of  his  old  friends  Allen  and  Bristow, 
and  of  Dr.  Sander;  also  whether  he  con- 
sidered the  Queen  "true  and  lawful,"  or 
"  pretensed  and  deprived."  He  refused  to 
answer.  Physical  anguish  could  be  little 
worse  than  the  ineffable  boredom  of  these 
two  never-quiet  questions.  He  was  then 
asked  by  the  Governor,  the  Rackmaster, 
and  others  present,  by  whose  command  and 
counsel  he  had  returned  to  England;  by 
whom  in  England  he  had  been  received  and 
befriended;  in  whose  houses  he  had  said 
Mass,  heard  Confessions,  and  reconciled 
persons  to  his  Church;  where  his  recent 
book  was  printed,  and  to  whom  copies  were 
141 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

given ;  lastly,  what  was  his  opinion  of  the 
Bull  of  Pius  V  against  Queen  Elizabeth  ? 
A  letter  written  at  the  time  to  Lord  Shrews- 
bury by  Lord  Burghley,  and  still  extant, 
shows  that  nothing  of  moment  could  be  got 
out  of  Campion.  During  the  next  fort- 
night, however,  there  was  poured  into  the 
ear  of  the  Government  information  regard- 
ing the  second  and  third  items  in  the  above 
category.  Houses  were  searched;  persons 
of  mark  were  apprehended,  tried  in  the  Star 
Chamber,  and  sentenced.  Almost  every 
manse  or  town  house  where  Campion  had 
been  harboured  became  known,  and  even 
the  names  of  those  Oxford  Masters  of  Arts 
who  had  followed  him  to  Lyford.  The 
Government  gave  out  that  he  had  con- 
fessed upon  the  rack,  and  implicated  his 
too  trusting  friends.  The  alleged  facts 
naturally  became  a  general  scandal,  and 
bred  grief  and  horror  among  the  Catholics 
who,  no  less  than  Protesiants,  were  thus 
driven  to  believe  them.  The  secrets  were 
probably  given  up,  under  panic,  by  three 
serving-men,  and  by  poor  Gervase  Pierre- 
point.  It  was  a  common  trick  of  the  time, 
142 


THE  THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

though  not  peculiar  to  it,  to  show  a  prisoner 
a  lying  list  of  names  purporting  to  have 
been  extracted  from  colleagues,  so  that  he 
himself  might  be  trapped  into  endorsing 
the  suspicions  held  in  regard  to  those 
names.  But  it  is  clear  that  Campion  was 
brought  to  mention  only  a  few  who,  as  he 
was  aware,  were  formerly  known  to  his 
examiners  as  Catholic  Recusants ;  and  only 
after  a  solemn  oath  from  the  Commission- 
ers that  no  harm  could  accrue  to  them  in 
consequence  of  such  supplementary  men- 
tion. Even  this  he  had  every  cause  to 
regret.  The  gentlemen  and  gentlewomen 
on  Lord  Burghley's  lists  were  carefully  in- 
formed, when  arrested,  that  it  was  Campion 
who  had  betrayed  them  :  a  cruel  slander 
which  he  could  refute  only  at  the  foot  of  the 
scaffold.  Thanks  to  the  reports,  first  of  his 
backsliding,  then  of  his  treachery,  his  great 
reputation,  for  the  time  being,  was  clean 
gone.  Having  thus  been  given  forth  to  the 
public  as  a  knave,  he  was  now  to  be  set 
before  them  as  a  fool,  and  shown  to  be  one 
who  possessed  neither  sort  of  superiority, 
moral  or  mental. 

143 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

Many  courtiers,  having  a  purely  artistic 
interest  in  Edmund  Campion,  had  begged 
that  he  might  obtain  the  chance  he  had 
often  asked  for,  of  being  heard  in  a  dis- 
putation. This  request  was  now  suddenly 
granted.  The  conference  was  public,  and 
came  off  in  the  Norman  Chapel  of  the 
Tower,  which  was  crowded.  Two  Deans, 
Nowell  of  St.  Paurs,  and  Day  of  Windsor, 
were  appointed  to  attack  Campion ;  he  was 
to  answer  all  objections  as  he  could,  but 
was  forbidden  to  raise  any  of  his  own. 
Charke,  the  bitter  Puritan  preacher  of 
Gray's  Inn,  and  Whitaker,  the  Regius  Pro- 
fessor of  Divinity  in  Cambridge,  were  the 
notaries.  The  lion  to  be  baited  did  not 
even  know  that  there  was  to  be  a  conference, 
until  he  was  brought  to  it  under  a  strong 
guard.  Time  for  preparation  had  been 
denied  him ;  he  was  allowed  the  use  of  only 
such  authorities  as  his  memory  could  fur- 
nish ;  pale  and  weary  and  rack-worn  as  ne 
was,  he  was  given  only  a  low  stool  to  sit 
upon.  The  well-fed  theological  worthies 
were  ranged  before  him,  their  chairs  stand- 
ing on  raised  platforms,  and  their  tables 
144 


Campion  before  Queen   Elizabeth. 


A  /./,v 


THE   THICK  OF  THE   FRAY 

spread  with  books  of  reference,   pens  and 
paper. 

One  who  was  there  tells  us  how  easy  and 
ready  were  his  answers;  how  modest  his 
mien ;  how  that  high-spirited  nature  so  bore 
the  scorn,  the  abuse,  and  the  jests  heaped 
upon  him,  as  to  win  great  admiration  from 
the  majority  of  those  who  heard  him  for 
the  first  time.  He  began  by  asking  very 
pertinently  whether  this  was  a  just  answer 
to  his  challenge,  first  to  rack  him,  then  to 
deprive  him  of  books,  notes  and  pen,  lastly, 
to  call  upon  him  to  debate  ?  and  he  added 
(wishing  to  be  fully  understood  by  the  audi- 
ence), that  what  he  had  asked  for  was  quite 
another  sort  of  hearing  :  a  hearing  under 
equal  conditions  before  the  Universities. 
During  the  course  of  this  first  conference  he 
w'as  twice  most  unfairly  tripped  up  :  once 
over  a  quotation,  in  which  he  was  right, 
though  he  could  not  then  and  there  prove 
it;  and  again  over  a  page  of  the  Greek 
Testament,  in  such  small  type  that  he 
could  not  read  it,  and  had  to  put  it  by  when 
it  was  handed  to  him  :  thereby  drawing 
down  upon  himself  the  ridiculous  taunt  that 
M5  L 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

he  knew  no  Greek.  This  he  took  silently, 
and  with  a  smile.  At  the  end  of  the  six 
hours  he  had  more  than  stood  his  ground. 
The  Deans  complained  afterwards  that  a 
number  of  gentlemen  present,  **  neither  un- 
learned nor  ill-affected,"  considered  that 
Master  Campion  had  the  best  of  it.  Some 
common  people  who  thought  so  too,  and 
said  so  in  the  streets,  paid  dearly  for  their 
boldness.  One  of  these  gentlemen  favour- 
ably impressed  was  Philip,  Earl  of  Arun- 
del, then  in  the  flush  of  worldly  pride  and 
pleasure.  He  was  the  real  victory  of  the 
Jesuit  apostle,  for  he  received  at  that  time 
and  in  that  place  the  first  ray  of  divine 
grace,  strong  enough  to  change  gradually 
in  him  the  whole  motive  and  course  of  that 
intensity  of  life  which  never  failed  the 
Howards.  As  he  stood  leaning  forward  in 
the  foreground  of  the  dais,  in  that  solemn 
interior,  tall  and  young,  with  his  great 
ruff  and  embroidered  doublet,  and  his 
brilliant  dark  eyes  held  by  the  pathetic 
figure  of  Master  Campion,  how  little  could 
he  have  foreseen  his  own  weary  term  of 
suffering  in  that  gloomy  fortress,  and  his 
146 


THE   THICK  OF  THE   FRAY 

sainted  death  there,  at  the  end  of  the 
years ! 

There  were  three  other  conferences  under 
like  conditions,  but  in  other  quarters,  with 
four  fresh  adversaries.  Campion  was  again 
"appointed  only  to  answer,  never  to  op- 
pose "  ;  that  is,  to  answer  miscellaneous  and 
disjointed  objections  against  the  Catholic 
Church,  without  ever  being  allowed  "  to 
build  up  any  harmonious  apology  for  his 
own  system."  The  last  conference  was 
notable  for  its  browbeating  and  threaten- 
ing of  a  too  successful  adversary.  The 
Bishop  of  London  privately  came  to  the 
conclusion  that  the  verbal  tournament  was 
doing  no  good  whatever  to  the  sacred  cause 
of  Protestantism.  The  Council  agreed, 
and  ended  it. 

Towards  the  end  of  October  Campion 
was  racked  for  the  third  time,  and  with  the 
utmost  severity,  so  that  he  thought  they 
meant,  this  time,  to  kill  him ;  but  his  forti- 
tude was  unshaken.  A  rough  and  honest 
first  cousin  to  the  Queen,  Henry  Carey, 
Lord  Hunsdon,  growled  that  it  were  easier 
to  pluck  the  heart  out  of  Campion's  breast 
147 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

than  to  wrest  from  him  one  word  against 
his  conscience.  His  arms  and  legs  went 
quite  numb  after  this  final  torture.  The 
keeper,  who  was  won  over  by  his  endearing 
prisoner,  and  was  always  as  gentle  with 
him  as  he  dared  to  be,  inquired  next  day 
how  they  felt.  "Not  ill,"  said  Father 
Edmund,  with  all  of  his  old  brave  bright- 
ness, "not  ill,  because  not  at  all!" 

Never  once  until  now  had  he  been  accused 
of  any  conspiracy.  But  he  was  a  trouble- 
some person  :  he  must  be  silenced  some- 
how. With  a  tardy  inspiration,  the 
Council  bent  all  their  strength  to  get  out 
of  Campion  some  acknowledgment  that  he 
had  been  mixed  up  with  the  Spanish- 
Roman  expedition,  and  the  Irish  rising  of 
the  preceding  year.  Not  a  shadow  of  proof 
could,  of  course,  be  produced  for  such  a 
charge.  Then,  as  a  final  and  sure  means  of 
indicting  him  on  some  other  count  than 
that  of  religion,  and  of  urging  his  execu- 
tion upon  the  Queen,  Walsingham,  with 
Burghley's  connivance,  hatched  a  treason- 
able plot  out  of  his  own  inventive  head, 
and  got  false  witnesses  to  accuse  Edmund 
148 


THE  THICK  OF  THE   FRAY 

Campion  of  it,  and  swear  his  life  away. 
The  "  Plot  of  Rheims  and  Rome  "  was 
described  as  an  attempt  to  raise  a  sedition, 
and  dethrone  and  kill  the  Queen.  It  had 
an  imaginary  but  recent  date :  1580. 
Everybody  or  anybody,  when  found  con- 
venient, could  be  accused  of  so  elastic  a 
plot.  It  was  first  charged  against  some 
twenty  priests  and  laymen  in  this  year 
1581 ;  but  it  was  brought  up  against  the 
Earl  of  Arundel  four  years  afterwards, 
despite  the  fact  that  the  supposed  interests 
of  the  Church  were  the  last  things  likely  to 
win  his  attention  at  the  time  assigned. 

On  All  Saints'  Day  arrived  in  England 
a  suitor  for  the  hand  of  Queen  Elizabeth  : 
Francis,  Duke  of  Alen^on,  King  of  the 
Netherlands,  the  short-lived  heir  to  the 
throne  of  King  Henry  the  Third  of  France. 
With  that  King,  while  Duke  of  Anjou,  and 
with  Alen9on  for  nine  years  past  (as  for 
three  yet  to  come),  Elizabeth  had  carried 
on  negotiations  which  ended  in  smoke;  but 
she  now  announced  that  she  "  would  marry 
at  last."  Little  Froggy,  as  she  endearingly 
called  him,  was  ugly  to  a  degree,  and 
149 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

many    years    younger    than    her    Majesty; 
he    was    brother-in-law    to    the    Queen    of 
Scots,  who  was  her  Majesty's  prisoner  at 
Sheffield.  The  dominant,  ultra-bigoted  party 
took  extreme  alarm  at  the  near  prospect  of 
toleration  for  Catholics  which  such  a  royal 
match    suggested    to    them.      To    reassure 
them,   it  might  just  now  be  most  useful, 
thought  the  Council,  to  hang  a  Jesuit  or  two. 
On  the  14th  of  the  month  Campion  and 
eight    others    were    arraigned    before    the 
grand    jury    in    Westminster    Hall.      For 
"treasonable  intents'*  of  the  Queen's  de- 
privation  and   murder,   these   "secret  and 
privy  practices  of  sinister  devices,"  befit- 
ting one  "  led  astray  by  the  devil,"  had 
"  Edmund  Campion,  clerk,"  made  his  re- 
entry into  England,  the  Pope,  meanwhile, 
being  not  only  aware  of  his  act,   but  its 
"author   and   onsetter  "  !      He   was   com- 
manded,   as   were  all   those   lumped   with 
him    in    a    common    accusation,    to    plead 
Guilty  or  Not   Guilty.     Up  went  all  the 
right  arms  of  these  "  devotaries,  and  dead 
men  to  this  world,  who  travelled  only  for 
souls,"  as  Campion  himself  called  them  : 
all  but  his,  so  disabled  by  the  rack  that  he 
150 


THE  THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

could  not  stir  it  from  the  furred  cuff  in 
which  it  lay.  But  a  quick-witted  comrade 
turned  and  took  off  the  cuff,  "  humbly  kiss- 
ing the  sacred  hands  so  wrung  for  the  con- 
fession of  Christ,"  and  lifted  it  high  to  cry 
its  own  mute  Not  Guilty  with  the  rest.  The 
Spanish  Ambassador,  Don  Bernardino  de 
Mendoza,  standing  close  by  with  his  secre- 
tary, saw,  with  a  pang  of  pity,  that  all  the 
finger-nails  were  gone  from  Campion's 
swollen  hands.  The  trial  proper  began  on 
the  20th,  before  *'  such  a  presence  of  people 
of  the  more  honourable,  wise,  learned,  and 
best  sort  as  was  never  seen  or  heard  of  in 
that  court  in  ours  or  our  fathers'  memo- 
ries before  us  ...  so  wonderful  an  expect- 
ation there  was  to  see  the  end  of  this  marvel- 
lous tragedy  .  .  .  [of]  such  as  they  knew  in 
conscience  to  be  innocent."  They  all  heard 
Ralph  Sherwin  say,  in  a  loud  clear  voice  : 
"  The  plain  ground  of  our  standing  here  is 
religion,  and  not  treason." 

Chief  Justice  Wray  presided,  a  Catholic 
at  heart,  and  wretched  ever  after  over  this 
unwilling  day's  work.  The  prosecuting 
officers  for  the  Crown  were  the  Queen's 
Serjeant,  Edmund  Anderson ;  Popham, 
151 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

afterwards  Chief  Justice;  and  Egerton, 
afterwards  the  first  Lord  Ellesmere.  The 
chief  witnesses  were  George  Eliot,  Anthony 
Munday,  and  two  creatures  named  Sledd 
and  Caddy  :  probably  as  evil  a  quartette  as 
existed  in  contemporary  England,  and 
worthy  forerunners  of  Oates  and  Bedloe. 
**  They  had  nothing  left  to  swear  by,'*  as 
Campion  reminded  the  jury:  "neither  re- 
ligion nor  honesty.**  In  no  special  order, 
but  with  much  ardour  and  diligence,  all 
the  old  tiresome  trivial  accusations  were 
brought  forward  and  pressed  in.  Campion 
being  spokesman  throughout  for  the  de- 
fence, and  his  alert  mind,  despite  his  weak- 
ened body,  meeting  them  all,  and  routing 
them.  He  was  charged  with  having  ''se- 
duced the  Queen's  subjects  from  their 
allegiance  "...  and  ''  reconciled  them  to 
the  Pope."  He  caught  up  the  word.  **  We 
*  reconcile  '  them  to  the  Pope !  Nay,  then, 
what  reconciliation  can  there  be  to  him, 
since  reconciliation  is  only  due  to  God  ? 
This  word  [*  reconcile  *]  soundeth  not  to  a 
lawyer's  usage,  and  therefore  is  wrested 
against  us  inaptly.  The  reconciliation  that 
152 


THE  THICK  OF  THE   FRAY 

we  endeavoured  was  only  to  God  :  as  Peter 
saith,  reco?iciliamini  Domino,  be  ye  recon- 
ciled unto  the  Lord.'*  Campion  was  in- 
formed:  "Yourself  came  as  Procurator 
from  the  Pope  and  Dr.  Allen,  to  break  these 
matters  to  the  English  Papists."  So  he 
rejoined  that  in  his  homeward  voyage  from 
Rome,  undertaken  by  his  vow  of  obedience 
as  a  Jesuit,  "  the  which  accordingly  I  enter- 
prised,  being  commanded  thereto,"  he  had 
"dined  with  Dr.  Allen  at  Rheims,  with 
whom  also  after  dinner  I  walked  in  his 
garden  .  .  .  and  not  one  jot  of  our  talk 
glanced  to  the  Crown  or  State  of  England. 
...  As  to  the  [Pope],  he  flatly  with  charge 
and  commandment  excused  me  from  mat- 
ters of  State  and  regiment."  .  .  .  Followed 
a  change  of  tactics.  "  Afterclaps  make 
those  excuses  but  shadows.  .  .  .  For  what 
meaning  had  that  changing  of  your  name  ? 
Whereto  belonged  your  disguising  in  ap- 
parel ?  What  pleasure  had  you  to  royst  it 
[in]  a  velvet  hat  and  a  feather,  a  buff  leather 
jerkin,  and  velvet  Venetians  ?  .  .  .  Can  that 
beseem  a  professed  man  of  religion  which 
hardly  becometh  a  layman  of  gravity  ?  No  : 
153 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

there  was  a  further  matter  intended.  .  .  . 
Had  you  come  hither  for  love  of  your 
country,  you  would  never  have  wrought  a 
hugger-mugger;  had  your  intent  been  to 
have  done  well,  you  would  never  have 
hated  the  light."  To  which  Campion  re- 
plied that  St.  Paul,  in  order  "  that  living 
he  might  benefit  the  Church  more  than 
dying,"  betook  himself  ''to  sundry  shifts 
.  .  .  but  that  especially  the  changing  of  his 
name  was  very  oft  and  familiar"  .  .  .  and 
that  **  he  sometimes  thought  it  expedient 
to  be  hidden,  lest,  being  discovered,  perse- 
cution should  ensue  thereby,  and  the  gospel 
be  greatly  forestalled.  ...  If  these  shifts 
were  then  approved  in  Paul,  why  are  they 
now  reproved  in  me? — he  an  Apostle,  I  a 
Jesuit  .  .  .  the  same  cause  common  to  us 
both.  ...  I  wished  earnestly  the  planting  of 
the  gospel ;  I  knew  a  contrary  religion  pro- 
fessed; I  saw  if  I  were  known  I  should  be 
apprehended.  I  changed  my  name,  I  kept 
secretly  :  I  imitated  Paul.  Was  I  therein 
a  traitor  ?  .  .  .  The  wearing  of  a  buff  jerkin, 
a  velvet  hat,  and  suchlike,  is  much  forced 
against  me.  ...  I  am  not  indicted  upon  the 
154 


THE  THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

Statute  of  Apparel !  .  .  .  Indeed,  I  acknow- 
ledge an  offence  to  Godwards  for  so  doing, 
and  thereof  it  doth  grievously  repent  me, 
and  [I]  therefore  do  now  penance,  as  you 
see  me."  This  charming  rejoinder  (again, 
how  More-like!)  was  in  allusion  to  his 
rough  gown  of  Irish  frieze,  and  a  huge 
black  nightcap  covering  half  of  his  newly 
shaven  face. 

After  all  this  mere  hectoring,  some  pieces 
of  "evidence"  were  produced.  One  of 
these  was  an  intercepted  letter  which  Cam- 
pion himself  had  written  from  the  Tower 
after  his  first  and  comparatively  moderate 
racking,  while  it  was  still  possible  to  use 
his  hands;  it  was  addressed  to  the  admir- 
able and  truly  holy,  but  fussy,  Mr.  Thomas 
Pounde,  who,  wild  with  alarm  at  the  pre- 
tended "  betrayals,"  had  written  to  remon- 
strate with  Fr.  Campion.  The  Queen's 
Counsel  now  read  this  passage  from  Cam- 
pion's humble  reply:  "It  grieveth  me 
much  to  have  offended  the  Catholic  cause 
so  highly  as  to  confess  the  names  of  some 
gentlemen  and  friends  in  whose  houses  I 
had  been  entertained.  Yet  in  this  I  greatly 
155 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

cherish  and  comfort  myself :  that  I  never 
discovered  any  secrets  there  declared;  and 
that  I  will  not,  come  rack,  come  rope!" 
The  comment  of  the  reader  in  court  was  an 
obvious  one.  "  What  can  sound  more  sus- 
piciously or  nearer  unto  treason  than  this 
letter?  ...  It  must  needs  be  some  grievous 
matter  and  very  pernicious,  that  neither 
rack  nor  rope  can  wring  from  him  !"  But 
Campion's  even  more  obvious  answer  was 
that  there  he  spoke  as  one  "  by  profession 
and  calling  a  priest,"  vowed  to  silence  in 
regard  to  what  was  made  known  in  the 
Confessional,  and  yet  pressed,  on  the  rack, 
to  divulge  secrets  thus  communicated  to 
him.  "  These  were  the  hidden  matters  .  .  . 
in  concealing  of  which  I  so  greatly  rejoiced, 
to  the  revealing  whereof  I  cannot  nor  will 
not  be  brought,  come  rack,  come  rope!" 
Well  chosen  was  this  answer  of  Cam- 
pion's. It  has  been  pointed  out  that 
if  he  had  stated  here  that  he  had  told  on 
no  one  who  was  not  already  found  out, 
he  would  have  loosed  the  informers  and 
man-hunters  afresh  on  the  whole  Catholic 
community,    until    his   other   friends,    who 

156 


THE   THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

had  not  been  found  out,  were  run  down. 
Instead  of  that  he  drew  off  attention  by 
reminding  the  court  that  he  could  not 
repeat  what  had  been  sacramentally  confided 
to  him.  Most  of  his  hearers  were  either 
Catholic  or  had  been  Catholic,  and  ac- 
quiesced. He  spoke  truth,  but  he  skipped 
explanations  :  and  such  is,  more  often  than 
not,  the  highest  wisdom  in  this  complex 
world. 

There  were  now  read  out  certain  papers 
containing  oaths  to  be  administered  to  per- 
sons ready  to  renounce  their  obedience  to 
her  Majesty,  and  to  be  sworn  of  the  Papal 
allegiance  alone.  These  were  said  to  have 
been  found  in  houses  where  **  Campion 
had  lurked,  and  for  religion  been  enter- 
tained;" hence  they  were  of  his  compos- 
ing. He  objected  that  the  administering 
of  oaths  was  repugnant  to  him,  and  ex- 
ceeded his  authority:  "neither  would  1 
commit  an  offence  so  thwart  to  my  profes- 
sion, for  all  the  substance  and  treasure  in 
the  world."  He  went  on  to  say  (assuming 
for  his  purpose  that  the  precious  papers 
were  not  forged,  though  they  really  were  so), 
157 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

that  there  was  no  proof  of  their  connection 
with  himself,  nor  was  it  even  pretended  that 
they  were  in  his  handwriting.  Anderson 
replied  with  singular  perversity  or  dulness  : 
"  You,  a  professed  Papist,  coming  to  a 
house  and  then  such  reliques  found  after 
your  departure — how  can  it  otherwise  be 
implied  but  that  you  did  both  bring  them 
and  leave  them  there?  So  it  is  flat  they 
came  there  by  means  of  a  Papist :  ergo^  by 
your  means!"  The  logician  in  Campion 
dashed  to  the  fore.  Could  it  be  shown  that 
no  other  Papist  ever  visited  that  house  but 
himself?  If  not,  they  were  urging  a  con- 
clusion before  framing  a  minor  !  which  is 
imperfect,  he  added,  and  proves  nothing. 
Apparently  Serjeant  Anderson  was  suffici- 
ently enraged  by  now.  His  highly  judicial 
retort  is  on  record.  "  If  here,  as  you  do  in 
Schools,  you  bring  in  your  minor  and  con- 
clusion, you  will  prove  yourself  but  a  fool. 
But  minor  or  conclusion,  I  will  bring  it  to 
purpose  anon!"  Eliot  then  rose  as  wit- 
ness, and  gave  his  account  of  the  Sunday 
sermon  at  Lyford  :  how  Master  Campion 
spoke  of  enormities  in  England,  and  of  a 
158 


THE  THICK  OF  THE   FRAY 

day  of  change  soon  coming,  welcome  to  the 
shaken  and  dispersed  Catholics,  but  dread- 
ful to  the  heretical  masters  of  the  land. 
'•  What  day  should  that  be,"  broke  in  the 
Queen's  Counsel,  "but  that  wherein  the 
Pope,  the  King  of  Spain,  and  the  Duke  of 
Florence  have  appointed  to  invade  this 
realm  ?"  Campion  turned  his  eyes  on  Eliot. 
"  Oh,  Judas,  Judas  !  ...  As  in  all  other 
Christian  commonwealths,  so  in  England, 
many  vices  and  iniquities  do  abound  .  .  . 
whereupon,  as  in  every  pulpit  every  Pro- 
testant doth,  I  pronounced  a  great  day,  not 
wherein  any  temporal  potentate  should 
minister,  but  wherein  the  terrible  Judge 
should  reveal  all  men's  consciences  and  try 
every  man.  .  .  .  Any  other  day  than  this, 
God  He  knows  I  meant  not.'^  So  much 
for  the  astonishing  "evidence  "  of  this  most 
astonishing  of  all  trials,  one  only,  under 
Pontius  Pilate,  excepted. 

The  chief  count  against  the  defendant 
was  the  old,  old  one  of  the  Bull  of  Deposi- 
tion, and  the  denied  authority  of  the  Queen 
In  spirituals  :  that  wretched  family  skele- 
ton trotted  out  once  more  !  "  You  refused 
159 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to  swear  to  the  Supremacy,  a  notorious 
token  of  an  evil  wilier  to  the  Crown.'* 
Campion,  who  was  surely  what  Antony 
Wood  quaintly  calls  him,  "  a  sweete  Dis- 
position, and  a  well-polish'd  Man," 
stated  his  position  once  more,  lucidly, 
and  with  perfect  temper.  He  began  by 
referring  to  what  passed  at  the  Earl  of 
Leicester's  London  house.  **  Not  long 
since  it  pleased  her  Majesty  to  demand  of 
me  whether  I  did  acknowledge  her  to  be  my 
Queen  or  no.  I  answered  that  I  did  ac- 
knowledge her  Highness  not  only  as  my 
Queen,  but  also  as  my  most  lawful  gover- 
ness. And  being  further  required  by  her 
Majesty  whether  I  thought  the  Pope  might 
lawfully  excommunicate  her  or  no,  I  an- 
swered :  *  I  confess  myself  an  insufficient 
umpire  between  her  Majesty  and  the  Pope 
for  so  high  a  controversy,  whereof  neither 
the  certainty  is  yet  known,  nor  the  best 
divines  in  Christendom  stand  fully  resolved  ! 
...  I  acknowledge  her  Highness  as  my 
governor  and  sovereign ;  I  acknowledge 
her  Majesty  both  in  fact  and  by  right  to  be 
Queen;  I  confess  an  obedience  due  to  the 
i6o 


THE  THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

Crownas  to  my  temporal  head  and  primate.' 
This  I  said  then;  so  I  say  now.  If  then  I 
failed  in  aught,  I  am  now  ready  to  supply 
it.  What  would  you  more?  I  will  willingly 
pay  to  her  Majesty  what  is  hers;  yet  I  must 
pay  to  God  what  is  His.  Then  as  for  ex- 
communicating her  Majesty,  it  was  exacted 
of  me  (admitting  that  excommunication 
were  of  effect,  and  that  the  Pope  had  suf- 
ficient authority  so  to  do),  whether  then  I 
thought  myself  discharged  of  my  allegiance 
or  no?  I  said  that  this  was  a  dangerous 
question,  and  that  they  that  demanded  this 
demanded  my  blood.  Admitting  (why  ad- 
mitting ?)  I  would  admit  his  authority,  and 
then  he  should  excommunicate  her,  I  would 
then  do  as  God  should  give  me  grace  :  but 
I  never  admitted  any  such  matter,  neither 
ought  I  to  be  wrested  with  any  such  sup- 
positions." To  all  this  no  rejoinder  was 
made.  It  was  the  identical  position  taken 
up  by  many  another  harassed  martyr.  The 
prosecution  next  turned  to  the  remaining 
prisoners,  using  the  same  weak,  wrong, 
skirmishing  tactics, — Campion  often  putting 
in  a  word  to  hearten  one,  to  defend  another, 
i6i  M 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

to  guide  a  third.  At  a  certain  point  he  ex- 
claimed :  ''  So  great  are  the  treasons  that  I 
and  the  others  have  wrought,  that  the 
gaoler  who  has  us  in  charge  told  me  at 
night  that  would  we  but  go  to  the  Anglican 
services  they  would  pardon  us  straight- 
way!" Serrano,  who  reports  this,  adds: 
"  They  answered  things  in  general."  At 
the  close  of  the  proceedings,  their  issue 
being  prearranged.  Campion  was  allowed 
to  make  a  speech  to  the  jurors.  He  elo- 
quently begged  them  to  seek  for  certainties, 
and  to  remember  the  character  of  the  "  evi- 
dence "  brought  before  them.  Alas!  he 
was  appealing  to  bought  men,  who  dared 
not  be  true. 

The  pleadings  had  taken  three  hours ;  the 
jury  deliberated,  or  seemed  to  do  so,  for  an 
hour  or  more.  Public  opinion  in  the  Hall, 
as  at  the  Tower  conferences,  was  overwhelm- 
ingly in  favour  of  Campion.  But  "  the  poor 
twelve,"  as  Allen  calls  them,  came  back, 
fearful  to  be  found  "  no  friend  of  Csesar," 
bringing  in  a  verdict  against  the  whole  com- 
pany as  "  guilty  of  the  said  treasons  and 
conspiracies."  The  Lord  Chief  Justice 
162 


THE    THICK    OF    THE    FRAY 

spoke:  "Campion,  and  the  rest,  what  can 
you  say  why  you  should  not  die?'*  Then 
Campion  broke  out  into  a  brief  appeal 
to  the  future  and  the  past,  a  lyric  strain 
such  as  was  not  often  heard  beneath 
those  ancient  rafters,  so  sadly  used  to  the 
spectacle  of  noble  hearts  in  jeopardy.  "  It 
was  not  our  death  that  ever  we  feared  I 
But  we  knew  that  we  were  not  lords  of  our 
own  lives,  and  therefore  for  want  of  answer 
would  not  be  guilty  of  our  own  deaths. 
The  only  thing  that  we  have  now  to  say  is^ 
that  if  our  religion  do  make  us  traitors  we 
are  worthy  to  be  condemned ;  but  otherwise 
we  are  and  have  been  as  true  subjects  as 
ever  the  Queen  had.  In  condemning  us 
you  condemn  all  your  own  ancestors,  all  the 
ancient  priests,  Bishops  and  Kings :  all 
that  was  once  the  glory  of  England,  the 
Island  of  Saints,  and  the  most  devoted  child 
of  the  See  of  Peter.  For  what  have  we 
taught  (however  you  may  qualify  it  with 
the  odious  name  of  treason),  that  they  did 
not  uniformly  teach  ?  To  be  condemned 
with  these  old  lights,  not  of  England 
only,  but  of  the  world,  by  their  degenerate 
163 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

descendants,  is  both  gladness  and  glory  to 
us  I  God  lives.  Posterity  will  live.  Their 
judgment  is  not  so  liable  to  corruption  as 
that  of  those  who  are  now  going  to  sentence 
us  to  death."  After  which  the  Lord  Chief 
Justice  pronounced  the  formula  in  use  for 
all  prisoners  condemned  to  capital  punish- 
ment. '*Ye  must  go  to  the  place  whence 
ye  came,  there  to  remain  until  ye  shall  be 
drawn  through  the  open  city  of  London 
upon  hurdles  to  the  place  of  execution,  and 
there  be  hanged  and  let  down  alive  .  .  . 
and  your  entrails  taken  out  and  burnt  in 
your  sight;  then  your  heads  to  be  cut  off, 
and  your  bodies  to  be  divided  in  four  parts, 
to  be  disposed  of  at  her  Majesty's  pleasure. 
And  may  God  have  mercy  on  your  souls  !'* 
Some  of  the  company  raised  a  storm  of 
protest,  but  Campion's  voice  rose  above 
theirs,  crying :  **  We  praise  Thee,  O 
God!"  Sherwin  seconded  him  with  the 
shouted  anthem  of  Eastertide:  "This  is 
the  day  that  the  Lord  hath  made  :  let  us 
rejoice  and  be  glad  therein  !"  Like  expres- 
sions of  triumph  were  presently  taken  up, 
to  the  amazement  of  bystanders.  Then  the 
164 


THE  THICK  OF  THE  FRAY 

doomed  men  were  parted,  and  were  all 
taken  away,  Edmund  Campion  being  put  in 
a  barge  on  the  Thames,  and  rowed  back  to 
the  Tower,  where  he  was  heavily  shackled 
with  irons,  and  left  alone. 


165 


XIII 

VICTORY:    DECEMBER    I,    1 58 1 

EVEN  thus  late,  fresh  proffers  were 
made  to  buy  Campion  over  to  the 
State  religion.  Such  a  circumstance, 
as  he  had  claimed  previously,  is  in  itself  a 
plain  disproof  of  any  treason.  Hopton,  who 
hated  him,  sent  Campion's  own  sister  to  him 
with  the  repeated  offer  of  a  very  rich  bene- 
fice. To  the  cell  door  came  one  day  none 
other  than  George  Eliot,  saying  that  he 
would  never  have  trapped  Fr.  Edmund,  had 
he  thought  that  anything  worse  than  im- 
prisonment could  be  in  store.  He  also  told 
the  man  of  God  whom  he  had  wronged  past 
reparation  that  he  stood  in  danger  from  the 
wrath  of  the  Catholics,  and  feared  their  re- 
prisals for  his  late  actions.  Campion  per- 
suaded him  that  they  would  never  push 
revenge  so  far  as  to  seek  his  life,  but  added 
that  if  Eliot  were  truly  repentant  he  should 
166 


VICTORY 

have  a  letter  of  recommendation  to  a  Cath- 
olic Duke  in  Germany,  who  would  employ 
and  protect  him.  Delahays,  the  keeper,  in 
the  discharge  of  his  ofhce,  had  to  stand 
close  to  the  prisoner  during  this  interview, 
and  what  he  heard  sank  into  his  mind  and 
made  him  a  convert.  Outside  the  Tower, 
there  was  a  ferment  of  excitement  over  this 
one  of  its  inmates,  and  over  the  question 
whether  the  indignation  of  all  Europe 
should  be  braved  by  carrying  out  his  sen- 
tence. The  Earl  of  Desmond,  the  acces- 
sory, and  Dr.  Sanders,  the  co-principal,  of 
the  late  revolt  in  western  Ireland,  were  still 
hiding  in  woods  and  caves,  and  weathering 
the  hardships  which  were  to  be  dismally 
ended  for  both  during  the  coming  spring. 
Burghley  concisely  said,  in  the  finest  Eliza- 
bethan spirit  of  punishing  somebody — no 
great  matter  whom — when  any  row  was 
made,  that  '*  Campion  and  Sanders  were  in 
the  same  boat,  and  as  they  could  not  catch 
Sanders,  they  must  hang  Campion  instead." 
The  princely  visitor  was  still  at  Court,  and 
high  festival  went  on  from  day  to  day.  The 
preoccupation  of  the  Queen  with  him  and 
167 


EDMUND   CAMPION 

his  affairs  was  thought  to  be  an  excellent 
item  of  the  programme,  as  it  kept  her  from 
thinking  of  Campion  and  his  fate.  Delay 
was  dreaded  as  a  means  of  getting  together 
of  the  great  English  nobles,  and  the  foreign 
ambassadors,  with  petitions  for  Campion's 
release;  and  it  was  thought  that  the  Queen 
would  never  resist  any  strongly-worded 
request  which  so  corroborated  her  own 
supposed  secret  feeling.  The  Council  still 
thought  his  destruction  desirable.  Mean- 
while, instant  appeal  was  made  to  the  Duke, 
by  the  Catholics  generally,  to  use  his  influ- 
ence in  Campion's  behalf  :  he  promised  to 
intercede  for  him,  and  may  have  done  so. 
At  the  last  moment  further  pressure  was 
brought  to  bear.  His  confessor  was  sent 
into  the  tennis  court,  where  the  Duke  was 
about  to  begin  a  game,  with  this  message  : 
that  the  royal  blood  of  France  would  be  dis- 
graced for  ever,  if  so  foul  a  judicial  murder 
were  not  checked.  The  little  great  per- 
sonage, thus  accosted,  as  we  are  told  by 
Bombino,  stroked  his  face  absent-mindedly 
with  his  left  hand;  then  raised  his  right 
hand,  with  the  racket  in  it,  and  called  to  one 
1 68 


VICTORY 

opposite  to  him:  "Play  I"  Not  another 
word  did  he  answer  to  the  tragic  matter  so 
thrust  upon  him. 

Burghley  fixed  upon  November  25,  a 
Saturday,  as  the  date  for  Campion's  execu- 
tion. Sherwin  was  appointed  to  die  in  his 
company,  as  representing  the  Seminary  at 
Rheims.  They  were  taken  together  one  day 
into  the  Lieutenant's  Hall  to  face  some  end- 
less argument  or  other.  The  opponent, 
"  by  report  of  such  as  stood  by,  was  never 
so  holden  up  to  the  wall  in  his  life."  On  the 
way  back  to  their  cells,  under  guard,  they 
crossed  one  of  the  Tower  courts.  '*  Ah, 
Father  Campion  !"  said  his  young  comrade, 
smiling  at  the  welcome  London  sun,  ''  I  shall 
shortly  be  above  yon  fellow."  Even  one 
hurried  free  breath  of  fresh  air  must  have 
meant  much  to  Campion.  To  be  '*  clapped 
up  a  close  prisoner,"  as  he  had  been  from  the 
first,  meant  that  his  windows  were  blocked, 
and  their  minimum  of  air  strained  through  a 
narrow  slanted  funnel,  latticed  at  its  skyward 
end,  and  with  but  one  tiny  pane  occasionally 
opened  at  the  bottom.  But  these  things, 
humanly  intolerable,   counted  for  little  on 

169 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

the  threshold  of  light  and  liberty  everlast- 
ing. "  Delay  of  our  death  doth  somewhat 
dull  me,"  wrote  Sherwin,  touchingly,  to  a 
friend.  ''  Truth  it  is,  I  had  hoped  ere  this, 
casting  off  this  body  of  death,  to  have  kissed 
the  precious,  glorified  wounds  of  my  sweet 
Saviour,  sitting  in  the  Throne  of  His 
Father's  own  glory."  There  was  a  good 
deal  of  haggling  and  hesitation  on  the  sub- 
ject. By  statute  law  any  caught  priest  was 
hangable;  but  public  opinion  (as  Simpson 
reminds  us  in  a  brilliant  page)  did  not 
always  run  with  the  statute  law\  Moreover, 
Camden  says  expressly  that  the  Queen  (who 
is  supposed  to  have  supervised  and  approved 
all  he  wrote)  did  not  believe  in  the  "trea- 
sons "  charged  to  the  "  silly  priests."  It  is 
remarkable  that  the  first  defensive  pamphlet 
put  forth  by  the  Government  after  Cam- 
pion's death,  was  one  "in  which  the  plot 
of  Rheims  and  Rome  was  prudently  for- 
gotten— the  very  matter  of  the  indictment !" 
By  the  time  the  day  for  the  execution 
was  finally  set  for  Friday,  the  first  of  Decem- 
ber, a  third  priest  had  been  chosen  from 
the  waiting  batch  of  victims,  as  represent- 
170 


VICTORY 

ing  the  English  College  at  Rome.  This 
was  the  Blessed  Alexander  Briant,  who  had 
applied  from  his  prison  cell  for  admission 
into  the  Society  of  Jesus,  a  fact  not  known  to 
his  persecutors.  If  the  entry  of  his  age  in  the 
Oxford  Matriculation  Lists  be  correct  (as  is 
most  likely),  he  was  now  only  in  his  twenty- 
sixth  year.  He  was  grave  and  gentle  in 
character,  full  of  charm,  and  of  the  most 
extraordinary  personal  beauty.  He  had 
been  carried  off  in  the  course  of  a  descent  on 
Fr.  Parsons'  London  rooms,  starved  and 
parched  in  the  Marshalsea,  tortured  by 
needles,  and  kept  in  the  entire  darkness  of 
deep  dungeons  in  the  Tower.  Norton,  the 
Rackmaster,  on  three  occasions,  proceeded 
(in  his  own  phrase)  to  "  make  him  a  foot 
longer  than  God  made  him, ' '  yet  he  adds  that 
**  he  stood  still  with  express  refusal  that  he 
would  tell  the  truth."  The  "  truth  "  meant 
information  of  the  whereabouts  of  Fr.  Par- 
sons, a  former  tutor  and  devoted  friend,  and 
of  the  place  where  Parsons'  books  were 
being  printed.  Briant  had  been  condemned 
the  day  after  Campion's  trial,  in  West- 
minster Hall,  where  his  angelic  looks,  out- 
171 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

lasting  a  hell  of  almost  unique  torment,  did 
not  pass  unnoticed  by  the  public.  Here 
(though  some  accounts  say  it  was  at  the 
scaffold)  he  carried  in  the  palm  of  his  hand, 
and  gazed  upon  often,  a  little  cross  of  rough 
wood  which  he  had  managed  to  whittle  in 
his  cell,  and  on  which  he  had  traced  an  out- 
line in  charcoal  of  the  figure  of  the  Crucified. 
Pedro  Serrano,  the  secretary  of  the  Spanish 
Ambassador,  saw  it  taken  away  from  Briant, 
and  heard  him  say  :  '*  You  can  wrest  it  from 
my  hand,  but  never  from  my  heart."  Not 
long  afterwards  George  Gilbert  died  in 
Italy,  kissing  Blessed  Alexander's  little 
cross,  which  he  must  have  taken  pains  to 
buy  back. 

These  three.  Fathers  Campion,  Sherwin, 
and  Briant,  were  led  forth  on  a  bitter  morn- 
ing, and  bound  to  their  hurdles,  in  the  rain, 
outside  the  Tower  gates.  Campion's  life  for 
the  past  week  had  been  nothing  but  fasting, 
watching  and  prayer,  and  he  was  never  in 
more  gallant  spirits.  ''  God  save  you  all, 
gentlemen!"  so  he  saluted  the  crowd,  on 
first  coming  out :  '*  God  bless  you  all,  and 
make  you  all  good  Catholics!"  The  two 
172 


VICTORY 

younger  men  were  strapped  down  on  one 
hurdle  side  by  side,  Campion  alone  on  the 
other.  The  mud  was  thick  in  the  unpaved 
streets  of  London,  and  the  double  span  of 
horses,  each  flat  hurdle  being  tied  to  two 
tails,  went  at  a  great  pace  through  Cheap- 
side,  Newgate  Street,  and  Holborn.  There 
were  intervals,  however,  when  the  jolted  and 
bemired  prisoners  were-  able  to  speak  with 
their  sympathizers,  who  surged  in  upon 
th^m,  and  thus  saved  them  for  the  moment 
from  the  incessant  annoyance  of  Charke  and 
other  accompanying  fanatics.  Some  asked 
Fr.  Campion's  blessing;  some  spoke  in  his 
ear  matters  of  conscience;  one  gentleman 
courteously  bent  down  and  wiped  the 
priest's  bespattered  face:  ''for  which 
charity,  or  haply  some  sudden-moved  afifec- 
tion,  may  God  reward  him!"  says  one 
annalist  who  saw  the  kind  deed  done. 

The  New  Gate  spanned  the  street  where 
the  prison  named  after  it  stood  until  yester- 
day; and  in  a  niche  of  the  New  Gate  was 
still  a  statue  of  Our  Lady  :  this  Fr.  Cam- 
pion reverenced,  raising  his  head  and  his 
bound  body,  as  best  he  could,  as  he  passed 
173 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

under.  The  three  martyrs  were  seen  to  be 
smiling,  nay,  laughing,  and  the  people  com- 
mented with  wonder  on  their  light-hearted- 
ness.  A  mile  or  so  of  sheer  country  at  the 
end  of  the  road,  and  Tyburn  w-as  at  hand, 
stark  against  a  cloudy  sky,  with  a  vast 
crowd  waiting  to  see  the  sacrifice  :  ''  more 
than  three  thousand  horse,"  says  Serrano, 
in  the  contemporary  letter  already  quoted, 
**  and  an  infinite  number  of  souls."  And  he 
goes  on,  in  the  truest  Catholic  temper, 
speaking  for  himself,  the  Ambassador,  and 
their  little  circle,  to  say,  "  there  was  no  one 
of  us  who  had  not  envy  of  their  death."  Just 
as  the  hurdles  halted,  the  sudden  sun  shone 
out  and  lit  up  the  gallows  with  its  hanging 
halters.  Fr.  Campion  w^as  set  upon  his 
feet,  put  into  the  hangman's  cart,  driven 
under  the  triangular  beams,  and  told  to 
put  his  head  into  the  noose.  This  the  first 
martyr  of  the  English  Jesuits  did  with  all 
meekness.  Then,  "  with  grave  countenance 
and  sweet  voice,"  he  began  to  speak,  as  he 
supposed  he  was  to  be  allowed  to  do, 
according  to  custom.  He  took  the  text  of 
St.  Paul :  *'  We  are  made  a  spectacle  unto 
174 


VICTORY 

the  world,  and  to  angels,  and  to  men  :  we 
are  fools  for  Christ's  sake."     Sir  Francis 
Knowles     and     other     officials     promptly 
interrupted    him,    and    reminded    him    to 
confess    his    treason.     So    once    more    he 
must    needs    say :     "  I    desire    you    all    to 
bear   witness   with   me   that    I   am   thereof 
altogether  innocent.  ...  I  am  a  Catholic 
man  and  a  priest :  in  that  faith  have  I  lived, 
and  in  that  faith  do  I  intend  to  die.     If  you 
esteem    my    religion    treason,    then    am    I 
guilty.    As  for  other  treason,  I  never  com- 
mitted any  :  God  is  my  judge."    He  spoke 
of  the  names  which  he  had  been  hoodwinked 
into  confessing,  and  protested  that  all  the 
"secrets"   held   back   were  spiritual   con- 
fidences, and  that  there  were  no  "  secrets  " 
of  another  nature  between   his  hosts  and 
him ;  he  also  put  in  a  plea  for  one  Richard- 
son, imprisoned  on  account  of  the  Decern 
RationeSy  whereas  he  knew  nothing  what- 
ever of  that  book.     He  then  tried  to  pray. 
But   a    school-master    with    lungs,    named 
Hearne,  hastily  stepped  forward  and  read  a 
novel    proclamation,    first   and    last   of    its 
kind,  declaring  in  the  Queen's  name  that 
175 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

these  men  about  to  be  executed  were  perish- 
ing not  for  religion  but  for  treason.  Dili- 
gent reassertion,  in  those  days,  seems  to 
have  established  anything  as  a  fact ! 

The  lords  and  sheriffs  present  reverted  to 
*'  the  bloody  question  "  :  what  did  Master 
Campion  think  of  the  Bull  of  Pius  Quintus 
and  the  excommunication  of  the  Queen  ? 
and  would  he  renounce  the  Pope  of  Rome  ? 
He  answered  wearily  that  he  was  a  Catholic. 
One  voice  shouted:  *'  In  your  Catholicism 
all  treason  is  contained  I"  A  minister  came 
forward  to  bid  the  martyr  pray  with  him, 
but  with  marked  gentleness  was  denied  his 
will.  ''  You  and  I  are  not  one  in  religion  : 
wherefore,  I  pray  you,  content  yourself.  I 
bar  none  of  prayer,  but  I  only  desire  them 
of  the  Household  of  Faith  to  pray  with  me, 
and  in  mine  agony  to  say  one  Creed."  The 
Creed  was  chosen  "  to  signify  that  he  died 
for  the  confession  of  the  Catholic  and  Apo- 
stolic Faith."  He  endeavoured  again  to 
pray,  probably  using  aloud  the  words  of 
some  of  the  Vulgate  Psalms  or  ritual 
hymns,  when  a  spectator  called  out  angrily 
to  him  to  pursue  his  devotions  in  English. 
176 


VICTORY 

"  I  will  pray  unto  God,"  answered  Cam- 
pion, with  all  himself  in  the  answer,  "  in  a 
language  which  we  both  well  understand  I" 
He  was  again  interrupted,  and  ordered  to 
ask  forgiveness  of  the  Queen,  and  to  pray 
for  her.     But  his  sweetness  and  patience 
held  out  till   the  last.     "Wherein   have   I 
offended  her?     In  this  am  I  innocent :  this 
is  my  last  speech  :  in  this  give  me  credit.    I 
have  and  do  pray  for  her."     "  Pray  you 
for  Queen — Elizabeth?"  was  the  insinuat- 
ing query,  made  often,  and  answered  often, 
as  here.     Campion  said:  "Yea,  for  Eliza- 
beth,   your   Queen   and    my   Queen,    unto 
whom  I  wish  a  long,  quiet  reign,  with  all 
prosperity."     He  had  barely  finished  this 
emphatic  sentence  when  the  cart  was  drawn 
away.     The    multitude    with    one    accord 
swayed  and  groaned.    Somebody  in  author- 
ity  (one   account   names  the   Chamberlain 
of    the    Royal  Household,    Lord    Howard 
of  Effingham)  mercifully  forbade  the  hang- 
man to  cut  the  rope  until  he  was  quite  dead. 
That  other  rope  with  which  Campion  was 
bound  Parsons  managed  to  buy,  and  he  had 
it  laid  about  his  own  neck  when  he  came  to 
177  N 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

die,  in  1610.  It  is  now  at  Stonyhurst :  a 
thin,  frayed  old  cord  some  twelve  feet  long. 
Close  to  the  quartering-block  stood  a 
spectator,  a  young  gallant  of  twenty-three, 
eldest  son  of  a  Norfolk  house,  who  had 
great  gifts  of  mind,  and  was  given  to  writ- 
ing verses  :  his  name  was  Henry  Walpole. 
He  was  a  Catholic,  though,  it  would  seem, 
a  worldly  one.  His  generous  instincts  of 
humanity,  however,  had  led  him  to  befriend 
hunted  priests ;  and  a  love  of  Campion,  in 
particular,  was  already  kindled  in  him 
through  this  association.  As  the  execu- 
tioner threw  the  severed  limbs  of  a  blessed 
soul  into  the  great  smoking  cauldron,  to 
parboil  them  before  they  were  stuck  on 
spikes,  according  to  sentence,  a  few  drops 
were  splashed  out  upon  Henry  Walpole's 
doublet.  The  incident  roused  his  mind  and 
pierced  his  heart,  and  was  to  him  the  instant 
cry  of  his  vocation.  Like  many  another 
spiritual  son  of  Blessed  Edmund  Campion 
(and  nearer  to  him  than  they,  because  he 
entered  the  Society),  he  was  granted  the 
glory  of  following  him,  through  faults  of 
his  own,   through  innumerable  hardships, 

178 


VICTORY 

and  through  martyrdom  at  York,  in  April, 
1595,  into  the  peace  of  Paradise. 

Meanwhile  the  hangman  had  seized  the 
second  victim,  saying:  "Come,  Sherwin  ! 
take  thou  also  thy  wages."  That  manly 
man  looked  upon  the  bare  bloody  arm  of 
the  other,  and  eager  to  show  some  public 
veneration  of  his  sainted  leader,  first  bent 
forward  and  kissed  it;  then  he  leaped  into 
the  cart.  Young  Briant  presently  endured 
death  for  the  Faith  with  an  even  calmer 
courage.  The  populace,  much  wrought  up 
over  all  three,  went  home,  through  the 
winter  mists,  in  tears.  Most  of  them  who 
had  prejudices  against  the  Church  lost  them 
for  good;  and  very  many  straightway 
entered  her  communion. 

The  Government  sent  forth  publication 
after  publication  in  lame  defence  of  its 
action.  Soon  France,  Austria,  Italy,  were 
inundated  with  accounts  of  the  event ;  these 
everywhere  produced  the  deepest  impres- 
sion. At  home,  a  great  tidal  wave  of  con- 
version to  the  old  Church  swept  in. 

Campion's   death,    last  and   best  of   his 
wonderful    missionary    labours,    bore    the 
179 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

most  astonishing  fruit.  The  long  storm  of 
persecution  raged  at  its  full  fierceness  after 
1 58 1,  and  it  burst  over  the  heads  not  only 
of  a  far  more  numerous,  but  a  far  more 
heroic  body.  Edmund  Campion's  spirit  had 
been  built  in  good  time,  as  it  were,  into  the 
unsteady  wall. 

Robert  Parsons  had  an  intense  feeling 
for  his  first  comrade-in-arms.  "  I  under- 
stand of  the  advancement  and  exaltation  of 
my  dear  brother  Mr.  Campion,  and  his 
fellows.  Our  Lord  be  blessed  for  it!  it  is 
the  joyfullest  news  in  one  respect  that  ever 
came  to  my  heart."  This  same  feeling 
breaks  out  with  powerful  irony,  addressing 
the  **  Geneva-coloured  '*  clerics,  who  so 
long  harassed  the  martyr-group  of  1581. 
*' Their  blood  will,  I  doubt  not,  fight 
against  your  errors  and  impiety  many  hun- 
dred years  after  you  are  passed  from  the 
world  altogether.  .  .  .  They  are  well  be- 
stowed upon  you  :  you  have  used  them  to 
the  best.'* 

And  Allen,  in  a  private  letter,  says  on  his 
part:  "Ten  thousand  sermons  would  not 
have  published  our  apostolic  faith  and 
180 


VICTORY 

religion  so  winningly  as  the  fragrance  of 
these  victims,  most  sweet  both  to  God  and 
to  men." 

No  remote  mystic  was  Edmund  Campion, 
but  a  man  of  his  age,  with  much  endearing 
human  circumstance  about  him  and  in  him. 
Caring  for  nothing  but  the  things  of  the 
soul,  he  had  yet  caught  the  ear  and  the 
eye  of  the  nation.  The  tidings  of  his 
end  meant  much  to  many  of  the  great 
Elizabethans :  not  least  personal  was  it, 
perhaps,  to  the  lad  Shakespeare,  whose 
father  had  been  settled  as  a  stout  Recusant 
by  the  Warwickshire  ministrations  of 
Parsons. 

An  aged  priest,  Gregory  Gunne,  came 
up  before  the  Council  in  1585,  his  thoughts 
and  tongue  too  busy  in  Campion's  praise. 
The  day  would  come,  he  said,  when  a  religi- 
ous house  would  stand  as  a  votive  offering  on 
the  spot  where  **  the  only  man  in  England  " 
had  perished.  There  was  still  no  sign  of 
such  a  thing  when  Mr.  Richard  Simpson's 
great  monograph  was  first  published, 
and  that  was  twenty  years  before  Pope 
Leo  XIII  beatified  the  Blessed  Edmund 
181 


EDMUND    CAMPION 

Campion  on  December  9,  1886.  But  now 
there  is  a  Convent  with  Perpetual  Adora- 
tion in  its  little  chapel,  and  two  bright 
English  flags  ever  leaning  against  the  altar, 
on  that  ground  of  the  London  Tyburn  :  and 
is  it  wonderful  that  the  vision  of  a  worthier 
memorial  haunts  the  imagination  of  those 
who  go  there  to  pray  for  their  country  ? 

Blessed  Edmund  Campion  was  ''  a  religi- 
ous genius,"  with  a  creative  spirituality 
given  to  few,  even  among  the  canonized 
children  of  the  Fold.  But  in  his  kinship 
with  his  place  and  time,  his  peculiar  gentle- 
ness, his  scholarship  lightly  worn,  his 
magic  influence,  his  fearless  deed  and  flaw- 
less word,  he  was  a  great  Elizabethan  too. 
He  had  sacrificed  his  fame  and  changed  his 
career.  He  had  spent  himself  for  a  cause 
the  world  can  never  love,  and  by  so  doing 
he  has  courted  the  ill-will  of  what  passed  for 
history,  up  to  our  own  day.  But  no  serious 
student  now  mistakes  the  reason  why  his 
own  England  found  no  use  for  her  **  dia- 
mond "  other  than  the  one  strange  use  to 
which  she  put  him.  He  is  sure  at  last  of 
justice.  In  the  Church,  that  name  of  his 
182 


VICTORY 

will  have  a  never-dying  beauty,  though  it 
is  not  quite  where  it  might  have  been  on  the 
secular  roll-call.  To  understand  this  is  also 
to  rejoice  in  it :  for  why  should  we  look  to 
find  there  at  all,  those  who  are  "  hidden 
with  Christ  in  God"? 


THE   END 


Printed  in  England. 


Zhc  St  IKlicboIae  Seriea 

Edited  by  the  Rev.  Dom  Bede  Camm,  O.S.B. 


LIST   OF   VOLUMES 

BARNABY  BRIGHT.   By  Rev.  David  Bearne, 

S.J.    (2  vols.) 

THE  STORYOFBLESSEDTHOMAS  MORE. 

By  A  Nun  of  Tyburn  Convent. 

FATHER  MATHEW.    By  Katharine  Tynan. 

JEANNE  D'ARC  :  THE  MAID  OF  FRANCE. 

By  C.  M.  Antony. 

ST.  THOMAS  OF  CANTERBURY.    By  Rev. 

Robert  Hugh  Benson. 

VITTORINO  DA  FELTRE:  A  PRINCE  OF 

TEACHERS.     By  A  Sister  of  Notre  Dame. 

THE    LEGEND    OF    ST.    CHRISTOPHER. 
By  Rev.  Cyril  Martindale,  S.J. 

GABRIEL  GARCIA  MORENO.    By  the  Hon. 
Mrs.  Maxwell-Scott. 

CARDINAL    WILLIAM    ALLEN.     By  Rev. 
Dom  Bede  Camm,  O.S.B. 

BLESSED  EDMUND  CAMPION.    By  Louise 

Imogen  Guiney. 

CARDINAL  POLE.     By  J.  M.  Stone. 

THE  MAN'S  HANDS.   By  Rev.  R.  P.  Garrold, 

S.J. 

THE   STORY    OF   THE   ENGLISH    POPE. 
By  F.  M.  Steele. 

MADGE-MAKE-THE-BEST-OF-IT.  By  M.  E. 

Francis. 
FATHER  DAMIEN.     By  May  Quinlan. 

JEacA  Volume  is  iti  Foolscap  ?>vo,  and  has  Six  Illustrations 
in  color.     Price  per  volume  8o  cents. 


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